


Bad Things

by salineshots



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Amputation, Blood and Injury, Chronic Illness, Claustrophobia, Concussions, Crying, Drowning, Horror, Major Character Injury, Medical Horror, Multi, Panic, Torture, Trauma, Vivisection, Whump, badthingshappenbingo, coughing up blood, hospital stay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-11
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-07-11 03:54:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 25
Words: 41,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15964154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/salineshots/pseuds/salineshots
Summary: These are my prompts for thebadthingshappenbingo! They are also posted onmy tumblr, which is a multi/polyshipping mess and does contain nsfw, so be advised if you want to go there. There will be some pretty messy horror, which I enjoy sometimes, but I know it's not everyone's thing, so please read at your discretion. Send me prompts if you like!





	1. Coughing up blood - Lance

Pidge’s ears were ringing. She couldn’t hear anything but the tone of damaged cells and a mental echo of Lance shouting to her.

The other paladins were still a hemisphere away, but there Lance and Pidge had been, repairing turrets in a canyon in the hopes that they would be able to cut off the occupying galra forces in a chokepoint. When the galra had appeared much sooner than expected, the two of them had fallen back into a cave. It had been a better option than dying out in the open. Besides, the other lions would be able to get to them quickly.

Pidge desperately hoped so. As the dust cleared and her visor’s low-light vision came on, she confirmed that she wasn’t blind; just thrown into darkness. The mouth of the cave had collapsed with a flash of violet.

The grenade.

Lance.

Lance had pushed her.

Her ears were still whining when she scrambled to her feet - or, knees. A twisting pain in her ankle told her that she had sprained it badly, and standing on it would only damage it more. She couldn’t afford that.

“Lance?” she called through the dark. There was so much rubble. Even with her visor’s aid, she couldn’t look through all of it fast enough to make her stomach stop twisting. “Lance, where are you?”

She heard a scraping sound across the tunnel. Her visor picked up on its source and locked on, guiding her search. She scrambled on her hands and knees toward it, and she yelped when she found him, half-buried under rubble. The largest rock was almost as big as she was, but she heaved against it to push it off of Lance, hopefully without injuring him further.

The scraping sound scratched at her nerves again. She brushed the rest of the dust off of him, and she tapped his helmet, scrambling for some response. He wasn’t moving.

“Lance, you answer me  _now_ ,” she choked. “Shiro? Guys? Come in, please.” Her helmet answered her with a half-hearted hiss. Was her comm damaged? Her helmet was functioning fine. Her only assumption was that the galra outside the cave were laying down interference. They were trying to cut them off.

The scraping sound came again, accompanied by a twitch of Lance’s shoulder.

The sound was him trying to breathe.

“Lance!” She didn’t know what to do but try and lay him out flat on the ground. Would that help him? She wasn’t a fucking doctor. “Guys, please come in. We can’t get to our lions, and Lance is hurt bad.”

The interference broke for a second.

“–n our way, hang tight–” Shiro’s voice cut in.

“–idge,” Hunk managed to get through. “Pidge, how is Lance? –at happened?”

Pidge stammered her answer. She had to stay calm. She could fix this. There was always a solution.

“He took the brunt of a grenade. It looks like he was thrown back against the wall of the cave we’re in, and some rocks landed on him. He’s not bleeding anywhere I can see. He’s not moving. He’s trying to breathe. I can barely hear you guys.”

Hunk’s voice came again. “–get him to breathe. Are his ribs broken?”

“I– I don’t know. I think so.” Pidge reached for Lance’s hand, squeezed it, and felt her eyes sting when his fingers squeezed back.

“Okay. See if you can get him to sit up,” Hunk instructed. “If not, turn– –is side. If it’s too painful, don’t–”

“Okay. Okay.” Pidge leaned over Lance to take him by the shoulder, and she supported his side and turned him gently. His hands scratched at the floor in pain, but he rolled onto his side.

And then he coughed.

Coughing was a good sign, Pidge decided. It was better than listening to his aborted, choking rasps. She was relieved until she saw the red staining the mouthguard of his helmet.

“Oh my God. Oh my God.” Pidge could hear her own voice breaking, but she pulled Lance up to hold his shoulders in her lap. “Lance, Jesus Christ.”

“Pid– –at’s happening?” Keith’s voice didn’t sound right when he yelped.

Lance was rattling. He struggled against her support until he had brought his hands up to his face, and he shoved his helmet off to give himself room to cough. Pidge pushed his hair back from his face, and her suit picked up on his fast-falling readings.

There were tears on his cheeks. He was struggling to hold himself up, and each cough only seemed to agonize him worse, pulling against very likely broken ribs. Blood and spit clung to his lips and chin, and the rest of it spattered the ground beside them. He managed to draw in a few rasping breaths of oxygen, but they left him coughing again so hard that he gagged. Pidge sat forward and caught him, giving him something to brace himself against.

“He’s coughing up blood, I don’t know what to do–”

“Pidge, listen to me.” A full sentence in Shiro’s steady voice was a balm. Even with the whir of equipment outside the wall of rubble. “Try to sit him– –en up his airway– –helmet has oxygen. Set it to eighty percent concen– –ang on.”

“Okay.” Pidge didn’t like the high hitching in her own voice. Her hands were shaking when she picked up Lance’s helmet. “Lance, come on, buddy.”

“Pidge,” Lance finally croaked. He found her arm and gripped it so hard she thought it would snap. He seemed to have cleared his lungs somewhat, but his breaths were shallow and ragged. “Don’t feel good.”

“I know, man. Come on. You have to trust me.” Pidge hardly even trusted herself. The pained weakness in Lance’s eyes went straight through her chest, but she pushed the helmet back onto his head and tapped on his visor to adjust the suit’s first aid responses manually. She dragged the oxygen concentration up to eighty percent, just like Shiro had told her. It would buy Lance some time, at least. Lance uttered a low whine, and he leaned against her shoulder. She let him sag there, and she held onto him.

“Am I…?”

“Nope. Lance, shut up,” Pidge grit out. The galran equipment outside the rubble was only getting louder. “Guys, please hurry.”

The response was such a crackling mess that she could hardly discern who was speaking.

“Guys?” Her voice broke.

“Pidge, it’s– okay–” Lance’s body seized with another hard cough, and he was beginning to shake. He didn’t feel like a fighter anymore. He was heavy, but he was trembling like a kitten, and a dark sense of helplessness crawled up Pidge’s spine. “They’ll– find us. You– okay?”

“I’m peachy keen, buddy.” Her own vision was blurring and salty. “We’ll get you in a pod soon.”

He tried to laugh. He couldn’t even cough properly anymore, and he threatened to buckle forward. “Eat– goo through– a tube.”

The scratching and crumbling coming from the wall of rubble was getting louder. Pidge froze when she saw a thin ray of light stream into the cave. The galra were exhuming them just to finish them off.

“Exactly. You just think about that tube goo, okay?” Her voice wasn’t shaking anymore. She saw Lance’s blue rifle lying beside them, and on impulse, she picked it up and braced it against her shoulder. Her aim probably wouldn’t be great with it, but she trained it towards that stream of light.

“Pidge,” Lance mumbled. He was getting quieter. “Hold it– closer. Watch… the recoil.”

“Laser guns have recoil?” she asked. There was almost a laugh in her low voice.

“This one does.” Lance coughed again. With a quick downward glance, she could see Lance leaning heavily into her, and red was trickling down his suit from the crease in his helmet. His hand was shaking, but he brought his arm up, resting his elbow on her knee. His hand came up to brace the body of the gun. He was helping her aim. “You’ve– got this, Katie.”

She held the gun tight against one shoulder. Her other arm held Lance closer.

Half of the rubble wall crumbled away at once.

The light was blinding. Pidge squinted past it and saw too many galra, too many soldiers and sentries, to stand up against. She opened fire anyway.

There was a flash of yellow through the mouth of the cave. The darkness came back for a second, smothered out by something much larger than the galra, followed by a scrape of metal. When the light shined through again, the hostile figures were swept away with a few screams and the crunch of tumbling boulders.

“Hunk, oh, thank god.” Pidge didn’t care that she was crying anymore.

There was no more feedback over the comms. Pidge could hear Keith spitting and snarling under his breath, focused on a fight, and Hunk was already shouting over him.

“Pidge? Is Lance okay? Are you two in the cave?”

“We’re here,” Pidge called back. “Lance is alive, but he has to get to a pod immediately. He’s not moving anymore.”

Shiro’s voice was strained and aggressive, but Pidge was just happy to hear him loud and clear. “Keith, you go in. Get Lance and Pidge back to the castle in Red. Be gentle, but move fast. Hunk and I can clean up here. Coran, get a stretcher to Red’s hangar.”

Keith was pulling around the broken rock wall in full tilt not a minute later. Pidge worked hard to stand up, and she could walk on her own if she was careful, but there was no way she could help support Lance. Luckily, all she had to do was watch Keith deadlift him off the ground and into his arms, and then she picked up their bayards and kept up at a limp.

While Keith piloted them back, Pidge sat on the cockpit floor with Lance leaning back against her chest. She had pulled their gloves off, and her fingers were pressed to the vein on Lance’s wrist just below his thumb. His skin was cold, and his pulse was soft and fluttering, but it was there.


	2. Hospital stay - James/Keith

Kogane took a week to wake up.

When he got the news, James decided that it would be nice - the  _right_  thing - to pay him a visit. His recovery would be a long process, and he would need someone to check up on him every once in a while.

It was disgusting. The Garrison had held out for four years. James had spent his formative years working his ass off, training and fighting and surviving while cities fell and the officers around him grew fewer and fewer, and then Voltron had shown up and cleaned up the galran occupation in a day. It was unfair and sickening. It wasn’t even good enough to be ironic. And James was so grateful that it made his chest ache.

He was grateful that those sickening nick-of-time heroes had all made it back alive.

People brought bouquets to those in the hospital. James had already made a couple of passes by Keith Kogane’s room while visiting others in the wing, and he had noticed a dozen vases already spaced out on every surface. When he steeled himself and decided it was time to visit him the next day, he picked a bouquet of the only flowers Keith hadn’t seemed to receive yet. White poppies seemed acceptable enough. And having finally braced himself for this visit, and standing right in front of the open door, there was only one thing in his way: Keith Kogane’s mother.

“Hello, ma’am. Mrs. Kogane,” James corrected himself quickly, and immediately flinched when he realized that wasn’t a correction at all.

The galra woman’s eyes narrowed.

“Krolia.”

“Krolia,” he repeated, scrambling to be gracious. Being gracious to galra wasn’t turning out to be a strong suit of his after living through four years of genocide, but he was trying. “I’m James Griffin. I attended flight school with your son.”

Her eyes couldn’t go any thinner, so her nose showed a crease of disgust.

“He told me he hit you once.”

“Ah. That did happen.”

“He wouldn’t tell me why.” Krolia growled this, but James took it as a shred of mercy, even if it left him gaping for an answer and surrendering eye contact. He was shown another small piece of mercy when Krolia decided to move on. Apparently, seeing him squirm was enough. “Keith isn’t taking visitors right now. He’s resting.”

“Of course.” James cleared his throat and held out the small vase of poppies. “I was hoping you could give these to him for me.” Krolia didn’t look like she would knock them out of his hand. She even looked ready to accept them, and then a soft, ragged voice behind her drew all of her attention.

“Mom?”

“Yes, Keith?” She turned, and James was afforded a view of the bed past her. Keith was lying there with tubes in one arm, a cast around the other, and a pallor over his face, but he was blinking slowly and very much awake. Something in James’s throat twisted at the sight of him, knowing his strength and comparing it to his current fragility.

“Who is it?” Keith asked, and Krolia repeated the name James had given her with flat distaste. Keith blinked again, still adjusting his vision, and landed his eyes on James’s. He didn’t quite smile, but the corner of his lip pulled to one side. “It’s okay, Mom. I wanna talk to him. Can you check on the others for me?”

Krolia frowned, and James watched as she stepped back to Keith’s bed, passed a hand over his hair to smooth it away from his face, and then turned back around to leave. She fixed one more scowl on James before passing him and striding down the hallway.

James stepped into the room once he was sure it was safe, and Keith watched him, either entirely calm or not knowing what to expect. He seemed wholly composed. James didn’t like being anything but the most collected person in the room, and Keith’s steady eyes made him itch. Without saying anything, he set the vase down on a clean space on the nightstand.

“How are your crew?” Keith asked first.

“They’re completely fine.” Thanks to Voltron. James swallowed dryly. “I’ve visited yours already. They’re doing well.” That made Keith smile, and James couldn’t take it for more than a couple of seconds. “They were afraid you wouldn’t make it for a while.”

Keith considered something, and he shifted his shoulders forward to push himself up on his good arm. He ended up tugging at one of the stands of fluids connected to his arm, and James watched his eyes flinch and the monitor of his heart jump for just a second. James stepped forward, and when he put his hand on Keith’s back to support him, Keith fixed his eyes on the nightstand. The monitor was beeping faster.

“Water,” Keith mumbled, and James followed Keith’s eyes to a glass of water on the table next to the poppies. He picked it up for him, and he watched as Keith took it carefully. His hand shook and his grip looked weak, so James helped steady it while Keith took one small sip at a time. When he was done he turned his face away from it, and James set the glass back down. It was an awkward position, but he held Keith’s back and shoulder and gently lay him down again. Keith sighed, somewhere between relieved and exhausted, and folded his broken forearm and his tube-ridden arm over his stomach. “Thank you.”

That didn’t sound right. Keith shouldn’t be thanking him for anything. Guilt and injustice twisted together somewhere below James’s ribcage.

“I owe you an apology.” He finally got the words out. “In flight school, I was kind of…”

“Kind of a dick?” Keith supplied, and James took it.

“I guess I was kind of a dick to you.”

“You’re still kind of a dick, James.”

He didn’t want to laugh, but Keith’s small smile softened the words enough to make them funny. Keith wasn’t wrong, anyway.

_Is that what mommy and daddy told you._

Jesus Christ. James’s laughter snagged on those words like a splinter, and he clenched his teeth.

He hadn’t known. He hadn’t known that Keith’s father had died years ago. He certainly hadn’t known that Keith’s mother had left him, had gone so far away that their skies no longer shared any stars. He hadn’t known anything.

He felt sick, and Keith was still studying him. His eyes were distractingly soft, and his head was tilted comfortably on the pillow. He unfolded his hand from over his stomach to rest on the bedrail.

“Thank you,” Keith said, “for staying and fighting.”

The sullen, impulsive, unruly child from high school that James remembered had grown up. The man in front of him was mellow. Intelligent. Brave and kind. It was humbling. In an impulsive moment of his own, James set his hand over Keith’s.

“Thank you for coming back.”


	3. Chained to a wall - Shiro

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CONTENT WARNING: horror; physical and psychological torture; blood and injury; amputation; trauma and panic; threats to loved ones; clone being gross and disturbing. Please don’t read if this will be upsetting or harmful to you. I don’t usually post stuff like this, so I just want to be careful and make sure no one sees it that doesn’t want to.
> 
> Also, heavily implied sheith

The fog of a headache kept Shiro from waking up all at once. He had to reabsorb reality in pieces. It happened in little details.

The taste and texture of blood was an interesting one. It was thick and tacky in his mouth, and it made his teeth stick together when he flexed and stretched his sore jaw. The inside of his cheek stung, and he followed the jagged cut with his tongue.

The surface of his cheek hurt, too, all the way up his cheekbone and temple. Something must have hit him flat across his head. Something was wrong. The breath he pulled in was shaky, and it didn’t calm his nervous heart.

He couldn’t move. Not by much, at least. His shoulders hurt.

It must have been the chains digging into them.

Shiro started and jolted, and the chains clacked and kept his weight supported by his shoulders and his sore feet. He couldn’t see anything at first; the room wasn’t that dark, but his eyes couldn’t settle on or translate anything. All he could sense was the dull pain through his muscles and the hitching of his own breath.

The room was dim. The light was faint and sick, and the walls were dark and just slightly violet. Everything looked like wine.

A galra prison ship.

He was back on a galra prison ship.

Everything was blurring before he could stop himself from gasping in breaths, too quick and shallow to be healthy. He tried to move his arms again, pulling harder.

His left arm was strapped tight to the wall, perpendicular to his body.

His right arm was gone.

It was just gone again. No metal to speak of. The old wound at the end of his shoulder hurt. Shiro stared toward it over his shoulder, jaw slack and eyes stinging.

It hadn’t been him. It had been an ugly weapon crudely stapled onto him. And he hated that he missed it.

“Quit squirming.”

A voice across the room drawled, sighing like he had said it several times already. Shiro’s sight flickered over the figure but still had trouble settling.

Pick out details. One at a time. Keep it together.

The figure was standing in front of what looked like a workbench, and at first, Shiro could only see his back. His shoulders were broad, and his dark hair was cropped short. He was dressed simply, in something black and fitting and almost like armor. It was too casual for the situation.

“You really awake this time? Not just gonna cry and pass out again?”

That voice sounded wrong. Shiro knew that voice, but not the weight of it.

The figure’s right arm glinted in the little light.

His head turned, and he glanced at Shiro from the corner of his eye, in profile, not bothering to commit his full attention to him. His nose was straight and scarred. His jaw was defined. His hair was dark, but for a shock of white.

Shiro’s chest hurt. His ears stung with the sound of his own panicked wheezing.

“Do you do this every time you look in the mirror?” the fake Shiro asked. He picked something up from the workbench and turned back around to step closer. His footfalls were loud. Each one dragged Shiro’s stomach lower.

He stopped when he was close enough to look Shiro in the eyes. His eyes were wrong. His irises were yellow, and Shiro couldn’t tell if they actually glowed or if it was just another effect of losing his mind. The fake Shiro was holding a knife and an easy smile.

“What do you think?” the fake asked. “Pretty convincing, huh?”

“What are you?”

Shiro didn’t mean to sob. He meant to sound angrier. This person had stolen his face and quite possibly his arm, but the rage couldn’t quite make it past the quailing in his stomach.

This had to be a nightmare. Even his panic attacks and derealization episodes weren’t this bad. This was too horrifically surreal.

“I’m supposed to be you,” the fake replied. He was turning the knife distractedly in one hand. Quick flicks of his wrist. “But I’m the one they got wrong. Really, really wrong. I almost made the cut. Almost made it through auditions. I could lie and pretend pretty well, and I almost got through, but I just didn’t have your compassion.”

Shiro’s eyes were fixed on the knife. His wrist worked harder to try and slip out of the strap on the wall. His vision was crowded at the corners, and he was only catching about half of the fake’s words.

“What?” Shiro choked out. The fake snorted, smiling like he was just listening to his friend make a joke.

“Let me paint the picture for you,” he said. “Remember that big fight? You assembled Voltron, stabbed Zarkon, all that good shit. But you got shocked pretty bad. You went missing - Black just zapped you out to keep you safe I guess, protect you from the blast or something. But she could only get you so far without a clear picture, right? So you went back to the place that was most familiar to you.”

Shiro shook his head. Sweat was already streaking his cheeks.

“No.”

“I’m afraid so. I guess this place made a pretty big impression on you. You went right back to your old cell.”

“ _No_ ,” Shiro insisted.

“Well, that’s how the druids explained it.” The fake shrugged. “That’s their theory. Either way, we have you here, which means you’re not with the paladins. And that means that the druids are happy to use your gross severed arm to make a sleeper agent.”

“You…” Shiro’s mouth was dry. He swallowed anyway. “You _cloned_ me?”

“Now you're getting it!” The clone smiled brilliantly. The knife flickered upward, and Shiro gasped and jerked backward when the flat of the blade slapped his cheek. The gesture wasn’t exactly careful, and the clone didn’t seem bothered by the line of heat that appeared on Shiro’s jaw. “I just– I really want you to understand. We’re in this together now. So you have to understand what’s happening.”

The pieces fell together like a bad game of Tetris, but Shiro could make out a vague pattern. The cold fog of his brain put together these details and realizations with a delay.

“What is the clone for?” he whispered.

“To be you. I thought that was pretty fucking obvious.” The clone fixed him with a disappointed frown. “And there were a lot of clones. They had to go through a lot of tries. Couldn’t quite get the recipe right. You’re just so special. Most of them got ditched or recycled after they failed their tests, but me… They thought I was fun. Good in the gladiator pits, like you, but twice as exciting, so they kept me around. Now I’m a disincentive for deserters. You know what they call me? Guess.”

How many of him had gone through this already? How many times had he died by the hands of the Galra? Shiro grit his teeth. “Do I really talk this much?”

The clone barked a laugh, and he slapped the knife against Shiro’s chest the way he would clap a friend on the back.

“I’m ass-backwards from what they wanted. So you can call me Kuro.”

That wasn’t funny. The hysteria in Shiro’s bloodstream almost thought it was funny, but it wasn’t. Kuro watched him shake, and Shiro felt that the edges of his smile would cut him.

“We’re both just extras now,” Kuro told him softly. “They’ve already got your replacement sent out.”

Someone else. A fake Shiro. A sleeper agent in his place.

Shiro searched the dispassionate yellow of Kuro’s reptilian stare, desperate to find a lie. Kuro just smiled back at him and raised the knife. Shiro felt the point of it drag against his side, from his hip to his chest, upsetting the plain clothes on his body. Familiar clothes meant for prisoners. The blade made a thin slice through the cloth along his ribs, and Shiro could scarcely register the bite of metal breaking his skin.

“When you went missing, the paladins were pretty broken up about it. Especially Keith. Hoo boy, _Keith_.”

The blood drained from Shiro’s face and clenched in his stomach.

“He was so happy to get you back.” The fake grinned wide. “He’s probably with you right now. You know, with that soft, sweet smile that makes your heart melt. You never told him, did you?”

“Don’t fucking talk about him.” A growl rose up in Shiro’s throat, and the clone perked up with interest.

“Who, Keith? Why not? I remember Keith.” Another cut. This one stung deeper, right along Shiro’s collarbone. He clenched his teeth at the pain, but he had dealt with worse. He wasn’t going to give this monster any satisfaction. “I have your memories. Those were copied over for me. They’re mine, too. I love Keith.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Shiro snarled. He thrashed against the chains, and the clone drove the knife inches into his shoulder. Shiro screamed, but he grit the words out anyway. “Don’t you dare talk about him.”

He had disappeared. He had abandoned Keith. He had abandoned the whole team. He had failed them, failed to be good enough not to get stuck here again, and now they were in danger from something that looked like him.

Kuro’s smile softened, gentle and sickening. The knife tugged out of his shoulder and traced Shiro’s throat, daring to see if he would move into it.

“I love Keith so much,” the clone cooed. “And he loves you.” The knife twitched away from his throat, and it followed the line of Shiro’s other shoulder. “I wish I’d made the cut. I wish I could see him, so he could love me, too.”

Shiro lunged. He only had his head to move, but it was enough to reach the clone’s hand and dig his teeth into it. Blood welled in his mouth, and he heard the clatter of the knife when it dropped. Kuro yelped, and even when he tore his hand from Shiro’s mouth and rewarded him with a sharp, metallic backhand that left a crack in his cheekbone, Shiro clung to the small victory. He stared at the frustrated, thoughtful look on Kuro’s face, and Kuro glowered back at him, cradling his injured hand.

“Looks like I struck a nerve,” the clone murmured. “Alright.” He turned back to the workbench. Shiro’s heart started to pick back up with each scrape of equipment. Finally, Kuro made his selection, and he came back to Shiro to show him.

A bonesaw.

“Oh, is this…” Kuro tipped his head to one side and smiled. “Did they use one of these for your arm?” He tested the blade on his own finger. “This is the very one they used on me. I had to match you.”

Jesus Christ.

They had pinned his arm down - mangled from a fight and not worth healing, according to his captors. They had braced his shoulder to keep him from thrashing. They had stuffed a towel into his mouth to shut up his begging and muffle his sobbing. He had felt the saw hit bone, and he had fainted before the metal made it all the way through.

It might have been that saw. It could have been. He had come right back to it.

“Don’t,” Shiro whispered. Kuro watched him blankly, and he sucked on the small cut at the end of his own finger. “Please. Don’t. You know. We both know what it’s like. Don’t do this.”

Kuro hummed, popped his finger out of his mouth, and let the saw swing at his side.

“Alright. I’ll give you a chance. I’ll only use it if you  _ask_  me.”

Shiro’s blood couldn’t have run any colder. Being brave didn’t seem possible when his whole body was shaking. What was this fake going to do to make him ask?

Kuro paced back to the workbench one more time, and he produced a tablet from one of the drawers. He looked strangely normal, like a real person, leaning back against the counter and turning on the datapad, flipping through prompts with the bonesaw on the counter beside him. When he found what he was looking for, he smiled, picked up both of his toys, and came back to Shiro on the cold wall.

“I’m not supposed to have this,” Kuro whispered, letting Shiro in on a big secret with a big grin. “But I knew you’d want to see them again.” He raised the screen to watch it with Shiro.

He saw the kitchen. This was the castle’s kitchen.

Pidge was sitting on the counter and swinging her feet. She was busy talking to Hunk while he prepared something on the makeshift stovetop, and Shiro could hear them talking faintly about modifications to the heating element.

Lance was in charge of coffee. He appeared to have stolen Hunk’s headband, and it held his hair back and made his grin look even bigger when he pushed a mug across the table towards the video’s perspective. He was looking Shiro right in the eyes and gave him a cheerful, “One sugar, one cream.” The other mug, he set to the perspective’s right. “And black, you dark, bitter weirdo.”

“Eat me, Lance.” Keith’s voice was too soft and happy to mean any harm. The view swung to the right, and there was Keith, sitting in a chair beside the perspective. He curled his hands around his own mug and looked up, catching Shiro’s eyes and smiling. It was the one that made his heart melt.

“Oh, there is is,” Kuro chuckled.

This wasn’t a memory. These particular moments were new.

“What is this?” Shiro didn’t want to ask.

“This is a feed from your replacement. Visual and auditory, picked up from his brain and recorded on his arm. The nerve signals aren’t perfect, so sorry for the quality.”

Shiro had hardly noticed. The display was softer around the edges, and the focus would draw one way or another. His own voice from the tablet chided Keith on his language, but everyone was having a good morning anyway.

“He thinks he’s you,” Kuro informed him. “That clone really thinks he’s Takashi Shirogane. This operation wouldn’t work otherwise. And it wouldn’t work without a kill switch, either.”

Shiro’s eyes snapped from Keith’s gentle, relaxed face, his ease and security in the company of a dangerous stand-in, to Kuro’s sharp smile.

“He’s hardwired like that. Little things. Steering them off course when we nudge him to do so. Pulling them closer to us. Finding weaknesses. If we tell him to, he’ll kill them.”

“Please.” Shiro didn’t have a voice to use. His throat was dry and so raw that he thought it might bleed, and even then, his breathing shook under the weight of tears. “I’ll do anything. Just stop.”

“Anything?” Kuro flashed him a bright smile that didn’t come close to his eyes. “Alright. So, if you had to choose between Keith’s life, and… your leg?” His hand hovered over the prompts along the side of the screen.

“Anything!” Ah. There was his voice. It didn’t sound like much more than scraping metal. “Anything! Take my leg, just don’t hurt them, please.”

Kuro’s eyes lit up.

“Keep begging.” He started tapping something into the screen.

Shiro’s screams threatened to break his lungs.

“Take my leg! Cut it off, I don’t care,  _take my other fucking arm, take anything you want!_ ”

Kuro wheezed with laughter. He buckled over and dropped the screen, and he laughed until there were tears on his cheeks. It sounded too much like a real laugh.

“I can’t believe–” He paused to wipe his eyes. “–you thought I had a  _kill Keith_  button. Holy shit.”

Thank God. Thank God, this creature couldn’t touch the paladins. Not yet. They still had a chance. They could figure this out. They could fight him.

The saw scraped against the floor when Kuro picked it back up. Shiro’s stomach coiled.

He had asked. He had begged for it.

“Why are you doing this?” Shiro choked out. “If you’re me– if there’s anything of me in you–”

“ _That’s_  why.” Kuro braced the blade of the saw over the middle of Shiro’s thigh. A terrified whine tore itself out of his throat. He needed to get away, but he couldn’t back up any further into the wall. He needed to fight, but he couldn’t even curl up into himself. He couldn’t do anything.

“You’re so fucking perfect,” Kuro growled, adjusting the blade to his satisfaction. Shiro couldn’t keep himself still, and he writhed with the few inches of clearance the chains left him. “Smart, brave, kind Shiro. Well, not all of you’s like that. It’s annoying, once you know all the self-righteous bullshit below the surface. Pretending you’re not completely broken. And I know. It just makes me wanna cut it all out of you.”

The saw bit into Shiro’s thigh. It tore through the cloth and slid through his muscle, and he shrieked. It wasn’t going bone-deep yet. Kuro was going to make this last.

“I know!” Shiro was babbling. His voice was rasping and unreal, too fast and too frantic. He had already lost his right arm. Losing his left leg would catch all the corners, north-east to south-west, enclosing his body in something missing. He couldn’t lose this leg.

“I know! I’m a piece of shit. You know, K-Kuro. You know me so well. The best. You know. I’m a coward right now, Kuro, I’m  _scared_.”

The saw stopped.

The blade slid from Shiro’s tissue and upset it on the way out, but then the metal was gone. Shiro sobbed with relief when he heard it clatter to the floor again. He only had one second of peace before a hand closed around his jaw and forced his head up.

Kuro was grinning at him. His yellow eyes were glinting.

“Look at you, spilling your guts,” he purred. Shiro wanted to vomit out his panic, but there was nothing in his trembling stomach.

Kuro turned one hand over Shiro’s shoulder, and his thumb found the wound where the knife had punctured him. The pad of his thumb rubbed against the raw flesh, and Shiro gasped when pain shot through his nerves and down his spine. His thumb turned to angle itself, and his nail dug into the wound. Shiro cried out and fought for any amount of distance.

“I’m your new best friend, Takashi,” Kuro whispered with a deceptively fond smile. “I’m the one keeping you alive. The druids wanted to get rid of you, but I asked for you. I earned you. Say thank you.”

“Th-thank you, Kuro.” Shiro hiccuped on every breath, and Kuro smeared his tears over his cheeks.

“Good little soldier. Maybe you’ll even make it out of here.”

Shiro didn’t believe him.


	4. Amputation - Pidge

Pidge shouldn’t have gone in alone.

She knew that now. She knew that, choking and screaming and clutching her leg while Allura dragged her back from the scored desert ground. Allura and Shiro had been the closest to her position, and it had only taken minutes for them to get to her. If they had come a single minute sooner, maybe Pidge could have kept her distance from the ruins’ single security measure. Maybe the wyrm wouldn’t have sent Pidge sprinting away from the carvings on the walls she’d needed to scan. Maybe it wouldn’t have clamped its jaws down on her calf and knee, biting through muscle and tendon until she felt something vital in the joint snap and sever.

As far as she could tell through the sweat, blood, adrenaline, and noise, Allura and Shiro had come in on a pod. Allura just have jumped out of it, because she was right behind Pidge, hauling her back by her armpits, and the pod was still flying, turning tightly along the wyrm’s side to tear its belly open with the point of the wing.

Pidge’s stomach turned. All of her blood was leaving her body through a chasm in her lower thigh. She couldn’t move her ankle. She wasn’t sure she still had an ankle. The pain was bile yellow. The sky was that same ugly, thickened yellow, vaulting over her head, catching in Allura’s pure hair while she dragged her to some modicum of safety.

“Pidge, listen to me,” Allura was shouting. The noise was too much. The throbbing in her eardrums was too much. “Pidge, you have to stay awake. Do you understand? Look at me.”

Pidge didn’t. She looked down at her leg.

She turned in Allura’s arms, and she vomited on the sand from under her visor.

“Pidge,” Allura snapped again. She pulled her up into her lap, holding her, and Pidge caught one blurred, dizzy glimpse of the wyrm lying still a good distance away from her. The ruins were red. She saw the pod come back around, and then Shiro was leaping out and bolting toward her and Allura. “Pidge, look at me. What’s my name?”

“Allura,” Pidge whimpered.

“Good.” Allura’s arms were the one source of comfort she had, a grounding weight around her chest and shoulders. “Pidge, listen. That creature was highly venomous. It’s in your bloodstream now, but most of it– most of it will still be in your leg. You need to stay awake until we can get you somewhere safe.”

Shiro dropped to his knees beside them. Pidge blinked at him through a haze, leaning back against Allura’s lap and stomach, and she worked to understand what Shiro might possibly be able to do to make this better. He could cauterize it, right? He could do  _something_. Shiro always knew what to do.

She had never seen his eyes so hard or his jaw set so grimly. He didn’t waste any more time staring at Pidge’s mangled leg than was necessary to assess the damage, and then he was talking to Allura.

“Princess, tell me a pod can fix this.”

Why did Shiro sound broken?

Why was Allura shaking her head?

Why were the other paladins panicking over her comm?

Hunk was pleading to know if Pidge was alive. Lance was screaming at Keith to reroute the pod containing the three of them towards Pidge’s location, and Keith was barking at Coran to bring the whole castle to the ruins.

“Shiro, we have to work fast,” Allura said, low and quick. “Every second counts. Tourniquet,  _now_.”

Pidge squirmed.

“No, no no.”

She grasped for Shiro’s hand and missed by a couple of feet. Her vision wasn’t working right. A failing system.

“Shiro, please,” she slurred. He had the decency to look her in the eyes, pained and sorry, for only a moment. Then he was taking off his belt to tie it around her upper thigh, and he pulled it tight until Pidge felt the muscles constricting under it and blood flow cutting off with an icy, prickling itch.

“Princess.” Shiro was still protesting, even as he followed Allura’s orders. “Please. There has to be another way–”

“There is a way to save her,” Allura bit back. “But not with that leg. It’s gone, Shiro. The venom will rot it and take the rest of her with it. The pod can filter out the remnants of the venom in her system, but even without it… It’s unsalvageable. The pod can’t save her leg.”

Her leg. Her leg. Her leg. Rotting, torn, gone, her fucking leg.

An animal fear bolted through her, and Pidge seized in Allura’s arms. She screamed and tried to buck away from her. She trusted Allura, Allura would never hurt her, so why was she saying her leg had to go?

“Shiro, no, please don’t, it’ll get better,” she sobbed. “Please please pleasepleaseplease.”

Lance and Hunk were all but screaming over her comm, demanding to know what was happening. The sounds of their voices distanced and then shut off entirely as Allura lifted Pidge’s helmet off, and she cinched her arm around her to keep her from squirming. Pidge was still crying as Allura forced her own folded glove in between her teeth.

“I’m sorry, Pidge.” Was Allura crying? She better have been. This was Pidge’s fucking leg. “Shiro, now, or she’s going to die.”

“Coran, get a pod ready,” Shiro said. His voice sounded like dust. He reached over with his left hand to grip Pidge’s right, and he squeezed her fingers tightly.

“Pidge, I’m so sorry,” he choked, and his right hand flickered violet.

Pidge was still screaming around the glove. Allura held her clamped against her chest, and Pidge made the awful mistake of watching.

Shiro made it clean. One swing of his hand. Skin, muscle, blood vessels, bone, nerves, muscle, skin. It all burst apart in one searing, nauseating line. Cauterized on the way through.

She couldn’t feel her ankle.

Her scream left her throat in ribbons. Her nails bit into Shiro’s palm, and he didn’t let go.

Her vision was just a pool of colors. Ugly yellow. Hateful violet. A spartan white against black, Shiro’s uniform. Deranged, she clung to his hand and reached for him with the other, and Allura finally let go of her.

The glove dropped out from Pidge’s teeth. Her thin fingers found purchase on Shiro’s shoulder, and he pulled her up, pulled her away from the shredded leg that wasn’t hers anymore, and cradled her. This was her captain, this was her leader, he was supposed to protect her, and there he was, chest clenching like he wasn’t willing to cry in front of her. Allura followed, and she spilled apologies while she stroked Pidge’s hair back from her forehead.

Both of them were trying to comfort her, and some fragment of Pidge’s awareness split off to give her the peace she needed. Numbness. Not happy, not blissful, just numb. Allura pulled herself around to shield Pidge’s view from the gore right beside them, but Pidge still stared past her shoulder at the red all over the sand. She stared at it until the shadow of the castle blotted it out.


	5. Cry into chest - Hunk

He could hear the groan of metal. He couldn’t hear Yellow.

He could hear the blood pounding through his capillaries, leaking out of some of the edges, forming bruises and filling lacerations across his forehead, but he couldn’t hear Yellow.

His comms were out. He couldn’t hear anyone’s voice. But as he waited, staring stunned at the grey dashboard of Yellow’s cockpit, he heard something rattling in the halls behind the door. Finally, he could hear Lance shouting from the other side of the door.

“Hunk, man, you’d better answer me, or by God, I’m gonna tear this door right off its– It doesn’t even  _have_  fucking hinges–”

Hunk was still staring at the dashboard. He had to stay right there. He had to wait for Yellow to bounce back and tell him the damage.

The door behind his seat screamed on its slides-not-hinges. He could hear Lance grunting and cursing and bullying his way through. The dashboard was still grey.

Yellow should have opened that door. Yellow should be flickering.

“Hunk, what is the  _big fucking idea_ , taking on an  _evil Galra death canon by yourself_. Block the beam, save the planet, crash into a goddamn moonbase, why don’t you,  _fine_.” Lance was still screeching. With a great shout, he must have tripped past the doors, because then he was stumbling around the side of Hunk’s seat, already gripping his arm before they’d made eye contact. “Oh, god, Hunk, you’re alive, right?”

Hunk nodded. He stared up at Lance, and then he looked back down to the dashboard.

“Yellow?” was the word to leave his mouth.

“What about–” Lance cut himself off and finally took in the cockpit. “Oh. Oh, god.”

Hunk was sluggish in following Lance’s eyes. He looked up to the roof of the cockpit.

A metal spike had torn halfway through the ceiling.

The odd little cry from Hunk’s mouth wasn’t enough.

“Hunk,” Lance stammered. “Hunk, look at me. It’s okay. We’ve got to get you out of here. We’re gonna run out of air fast. Your helmet’s damaged.”

What, like Yellow couldn’t recycle the air well enough? Like the hole in his lion was going to actually hurt them?

“Listen to me,” Lance pleaded. “The base’s life support is failing. We’ve got to get back in Blue. We’ll pull Yellow out.”

Hunk gripped the controls of his unresponsive lion.

Lance kept begging. “ _Hunk_.”

“I’m not leaving him.”

“You’re not,” Lance pressed. “We’re not leaving without him. We’ve gotta get out of here, buddy. Come on.” When Lance looped one arm behind Hunk’s shoulders to help him up, Hunk didn’t fight him. He didn’t have anything in him to fight with. He listened to Lance report the situation to the team, over his functioning helmet, through his functioning lion, in rapid speech.

“Hunk’s alive. I think he has a concussion. Yellow’s extremely damaged and not responding. I’m bringing Hunk back in Blue. We’re gonna need Black to help dig Yellow out of the wreckage.”

Extremely damaged.

What kind of paladin was he, to put his lion in that position? How badly had he failed the lion that had  _chosen_  him, put its faith in him, to leave it broken and crumpled like this?

Hunk’s legs wobbled when Lance pulled him up out of the chair. They made it out of the cockpit with small steps, harried only by Lance’s sense of urgency. As if moving mattered. As if going any faster  _away_  from Yellow would help wake him back up.

By the time they made it into Blue, Hunk was feeling the concussion. Once the doors sealed, Lance sat them down beside the seat, pulled both of their helmets off, and ran his fingers over Hunk’s scalp, tracing a bright line of pain over his brow. Hunk flinched.

“Bruised pretty bad, buddy,” Lance muttered. “God. Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“Yellow,” Hunk said again.

“I know.” Lance’s fingers passed through Hunk’s hair again, and the tension behind his sternum pulled and snapped.

Hunk whimpered, and it welled up into something uglier. Before he could stop it, before he could recognize that he  _couldn’t_  stop it, tears were running over his cheeks and sliding onto the floor. Lance whispered something warm and soft, and Hunk broke down the middle. He slumped forward in Lance’s arms, and Lance held him tight, keeping Hunk’s face hidden in the crook of his shoulder.

“I’ve got you, buddy. You’re okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

It wasn’t. Hunk wept and shook his head, and the rough padded glove on Lance’s hand ran over his hair again.

“Yes, it is.” This wasn’t the voice Lance would use with children with scraped knees. This was the voice he’d use on a loved one in hospice. “You’re right here, Hunk. We’re gonna pick up Yellow and bring him back to the castle, and we’ll take care of him there. We gotta take care of you first, though. Can you look at me? Gotta check your pupils, bud.”

Hunk was still crying, and Yellow was still battered and stirred into the rubble of the moonbase. Yellow was rubble, and Hunk was warm and safe with his friend, getting his eyes checked.

“Have to get him,” Hunk rasped.

“I know. Everyone’s on their way,” Lance soothed. His thumb pulled gently at the top of Hunk’s cheek, urging his eyes open one at a time. “Shiro and Keith are gonna get Yellow. Pidge and I are gonna take you home. We’re gonna get you to a pod and make sure you’re all fixed up, and then we’ll get Yellow up and running again. You’ve got to be ready to work on him when he gets back, right? We’ll see what we can do to get him patched up.”

Hunk almost didn’t want Lance to make those promises, but someone had to. When the others’ voices came in over the blue helmet on the floor, Lance was still running diagnostics on him, and Hunk was still crying.


	6. Caught in a storm - Pidge and Matt

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with elements of 'doesn't realize they've been injured' and 'self-surgery'

Pidge was already aboard Green when she had received the distress signal, and if it had been from anyone else, maybe she would have slowed down, stayed in place, and waited for the other paladins to finish up with their own missions across the system. Maybe she would have waited for backup like she was supposed to. But it was from Matthew Holt.

She had met with him again before they had gone back to their own missions. As long as she knew that he was _okay_ , that he was out fighting with the rebels, that she would have contact to him whenever she wanted to check in, she didn't feel too pressing of a need to keep him locked in the safety of the castle. Matt needed just as badly as she did to be an active agent, to _help_ , and she wouldn't hold him back from that.

She was reconsidering that stance as she broke the planet’s atmosphere. Matt could run off and fight with the coalition, sure - up until the point that his team was torn apart by a Galra strike squad. She only had so many times that she could let him go again.

The planet was red past its atmosphere. Oxygen. Water. Habitable. Iron-rich soil, stirred up from the battle and harsh winds and leaving rusty clouds sweeping through the canyons. Pidge followed the tracker on Matt’s distress signal, and it only took her a minute of bolting between the cliffs to find him. His ship was smaller, middle-ranged, and torn open through the center.

Landing beside him and climbing out of Green was the hard part. It was those seconds of _not knowing_ that had a grip on her lungs. And then she saw him reaching out, pulling himself from the wreckage. She yelped his name, stumbled the last few feet from Green’s ramp, and threw her arms around him.

“I’m okay,” Matt grit out. “I’m okay.”

“Are you?” Pidge’s eyes darted back to Green when she signaled to her:

It’s time to go. Bring him fast. Time to go. They’re coming. It’s coming.

Pidge looped Matt’s arm over her shoulders. She couldn’t have carried his weight, but he sighed out a dry, grim chuckle that said he appreciated the sentiment. He stumbled with her, off-balance but working not to weigh her down, and they made it back into Green’s cockpit. She took a glance at the dashboard and set Matt down on a bench by the seat.

“The Galra are coming back around,” she assessed. “Looks like they’re still combing through the area, but they’re more concentrated in the upper atmosphere.” Another alert across her screen made her smile wryly. “They’re pulling back for the storm.”

“Storm’s bad,” Matt grunted.

“Yeah, you think?” Pidge grit her teeth and took off in Green, leaving the mangled shuttle on the ground below them. The storm would set in fast, dust and lightning, enough to hide them and enough to discourage the Galra from closing in on them. Pidge considered the risk of cloaking Green and trying to sneak past the fleet surrounding them, or letting the storm take care of any Galra ships that tried to come in after them. “Hang tight. I’m gonna find somewhere for us to hole up. I’ve already sent our location to the rest of the team. They’ll be here to back us up by the time the storm wears off.”

“Sounds solid.” Matt leaned his head back against the wall and heaved out a sigh. It would take a while for the adrenaline to wear off, but for the moment, Pidge had to be happy seeing him safe. “They didn’t check for life signs. They just… One shot. My ship was down. They thought that was it, and they moved onto the next one.” Pidge turned her head to look at him fully. Matt’s eyes were closed, and his jaw was clenched. He had a hollow smile trying to find a place on his mouth, like he wanted to mock himself. Like he wasn’t allowed to complain. Like he wasn’t allowed to be shocked by risk and loss and death in war. Like he should have been used to this by now.

Pidge pushed down the pit in her chest. She turned into another vein of the canyons, and she followed Green’s guidance into a deep, wide cave carved halfway into the height of the cliffs. It looked artificial, built for exactly what they needed: a storm shelter. Pidge wondered what civilization had last used it.

“You sure you’re okay?” she checked again.

“Yeah.” Matt sounded winded. As soon as Green was situated toward the back of the cave, Pidge rose from her seat to tend to him. “Yeah,” he repeated, staring somewhere at the floor.

His hand was tucked tightly over his side. Pidge’s eyes locked onto it.

“Matt, what is it?” she growled. She stepped forward, reaching for his arm, and he flinched back, looking up at her in confusion. Slowly he looked down at his side, and he lifted his hand off of it.

The metal barely even glinted in the light. It just looked dark. Black metal framed by grey armor and red-black blood, thick and wrong.

There was a piece of shrapnel sticking out of her brother’s abdomen.

“Don’t move.” PIdge’s voice was as hard and dark as stone. “Jesus, Matt.” She didn’t give herself time to grip his shoulder, as much as she wanted to stay right at his side. She pivoted where she stood, and she scrambled to the cabinets along the back of Green’s cockpit. When she had located and returned with the first aid kit, Matt was still seated, staring at his side in shock. It was setting in that Matt really shouldn’t be sitting up if he was losing that much blood, and Pidge reluctantly, gingerly, began to move him. She helped him lie back on the bench, and she set a rolled-up blanket under his feet. Matt was trying to reach for the kit, and Pidge didn’t have much choice but to hand him what he wanted. By that point, he was far more trained than she was in field medicine.

His fingers fumbled over a small scanner. Pidge thought it looked like an outdated calculator, but he understood its function well enough to wake it up, hold it over his bleeding side, and run a diagnostic. Pidge waited in tense silence, and then he looked at the screen to report.

“Muscle tissue’s pretty bad,” he mumbled. “Abdominal cavity might be a little punctured.”

“A _little_?” Pidge snapped. “How much is a little, Matt? Graze-little, or septic-little?”

Matt grunted and shrugged, and Pidge was tempted to finish him off. They were quiet for a moment, and Pidge heard the wind and sand rattling outside of the cave entrance. It carried a low, eerie howl, and Pidge cleared her throat to interrupt it. Matt jerked his head up and reached for a pair of tweezers next.

“Nope. Nuh-uh.” Pidge held them away from him. “If you try and rip this thing out, you’ll tear something. You’ll just bleed out faster.”

“I know, Pidge, I’m not an idiot,” Matt scoffed. He reached for the tweezers again, more insistent, and Pidge glared at him when she handed them over. She was even more reluctant to pass him a pair of scissors and what she could only think of as a long, dull needle.

“Hold the scan for me,” Matt mumbled, and he craned his head up on his neck to watch his work. He cut open the side of his shirt to access the wound, and he hissed whenever a fiber caught on the shard of metal and tugged. Scissors and bloodied cloth set aside, Pidge held the imaging device at an angle that Matt could read it. Its screen showed a blur, but she could decipher the general shapes of layers: skin, muscle, fascia, and the jagged strip of metal embedded in it.

“You’re gonna try and rip it out, aren’t you?” Pidge groused.

“ _No_ , Pidge, I’m gonna try and _ease_ it out. It’s gonna have to come out sooner or later, and I don’t want it digging any deeper.” Matt didn’t look at her while he grumbled, but his teeth were clenched and his fingers were just barely shaking. He held the shrapnel with the tweezers, and the other instrument was angled delicately, pressing his own tissue aside to keep the metal from catching on any other edges. “With our luck, we’ll get in a fight and get thrown around again on our way off this planet. It’ll just get worse if I don’t.”

“You’re gonna bleed out.”

“No, I’m not. There’s stuff in the kit for that, and then you can pop me in one of those healing pods on the castle, right?” Matt stopped grumbling for just a moment, and he spared Pidge a weary smile. “It’ll be okay, Pidge. But you gotta quit distracting me now.”

Pidge tightened her jaw and held the screen steady, and as sick as it made her, she couldn’t take her eyes off the metal instruments digging into her brother’s abdomen. The metal shard was barely bigger than Matt’s thumb, and that was far too much to be sticking out of his body. As he moved it as gingerly as he could, Matt hissed under his breath, cursed the way their dad had taught them not to, and eventually had to set the instruments aside and take a break. Lines of sweat patterned his temple, and the skin around his eyes was grey and pained. Over the course of these efforts, Pidge found herself rooting for his efforts more than hoping that he would quit and wait for the infirmary; seeing him struggle with the strip of metal only made her want to see it _out_ of him.

“C’mon, Matt.” She set her hand on his shoulder, and she checked the grainy screen of the scanner. From what little she could tell, Matt had made progress, but he was starting to bleed more. “You almost got it. We’ve gotta close this up soon, right?”

“Right.” He kept his eyes shut tight, swallowed hard, and blew a tense, quivering sigh past his lips. “Okay. Okay.”

He picked up the tools again, the best they had available, and worked his delicate way back into the injury.

He had eased it out a little further, and he muttered with some thin relief that the end of the shard was far enough away from anything vital.

Pidge was feeling optimistic. Of course, that was always a mistake. Once Matt decided he was in the clear, he dropped the long, thin instrument, grabbed the shard with his fingers, and tore it straight out. He cried out and whimpered, and Pidge dropped the scanner on the floor to grip his wrist in reflexive support.

“Matt, you idiot, you said you wouldn’t--”

“It’s out, isn’t it?” Matt snapped hoarsely. “Sh-shoot. Pressure.” He dropped the shard on the floor by the scanner, and when he clasped his hands over the hole in his side, Pidge used one of her own to add some stabilizing weight to them. “Can. In the bag. Spray can. Disinfectant.”

“Sure, Matt.” Pidge knew she was seething, and she made no attempt to keep the ashes out of her voice. She reached into the kit anyway and dug around for any cans she could find. “A topical disinfectant for a _gut wound_. Sure. Great plan.” She held up the couple of cans she found, and when Matt nodded at one of them, she popped the cap off of it, wiped away most of the blood with a sterile cloth, and sprayed the contents over the wound.

The rebels must have taught Matt to curse. Pidge’s face reddened; that level of vehemence only had so many meanings, no matter the vocabulary. After cleaning the wound as much as she could, she tore open the bandage Matt pointed to, plastered it over his side, and held tight. Another agonized whine bubbled out of him, but Matt finally let his head fall back and worked on catching his breath.

“Better,” he breathed. “Better.”

“There’s a bottle in here,” Pidge offered, sifting through the kit again. With Matt in less immediate danger, she needed to find a way to alleviate his pain. “Looks a lot like hydrocodone.”

“Don’t need it. Regular dose of that for a human is like fifteen pills, anyway.” Matt let out a long sigh then, and his breathing finally evened out to something slow and calm. “How much longer is the storm gonna be?”

Pidge sat up on her knees to check the nearby console. Green showed her a map of their location under a blur of storm surge, and she watched it blink by in a projected pattern.

“Couple hours.” She patted Matt’s forearm and turned around again, and she put up the kit and went to another cabinet for some water. She brought that back to the bench and made Matt take a few sips. “Just take it easy for a while. We’ll get you into a pod first thing.”

Matt smiled without opening his eyes. “What are my chances of you letting me back off the castle again?”

Pidge snorted. At least he’d already figured it out.

“Not good.”


	7. Concussion - Shiro/Lance

Lance had always wanted to see Shiro fly. It had been a daydream for him as a new recruit, looking up to the youngest deep space pilot in history and wondering if he was just as calm and cool in the cockpit as out of it. He had seen Shiro fly Black since then, and it was astounding. His lion was steady, reliable, each maneuver graceful and measured. But Lance had always been an outside viewer in that case.

He finally got his wish in that shuttle. He got to see the way Shiro’s knuckles stood out in his gloves where he gripped the controls. He got to feel the tight turns, the miniscule adjustments, the split-second decisions that kept them from getting shot out of the atmosphere. He got to see the tension in Shiro’s jaw, the hard focus in his eyes, and the sober grip he had on their situation that Lance lacked. He only wished he had time to savor it, but Lance had all of two seconds to take in firsthand the beauty of Shiro’s flying.

“Lance, get them off us.” Shiro’s voice didn’t snap, but it was hard and unquestionable. With only the two of them in the shuttle, Shiro had taken the pilot’s seat, and Lance was now in charge of the minimal munitions in the seat behind him, watching their pursuers on his dashboard. They were systems away from the others and their lions. They weren’t even in their paladin armor, but borrowed clothes from the planet’s rebels many miles behind them. Lance was the only backup Shiro had.

He wasn’t good enough. Again.

There were five Galra fighters on them. Lance took down three while they swept over the valley. The slate grey jets tore trenches into the dirt and grass and exploded when their fuel reserves ignited.

The fourth caught them with a blast on the shuttle’s hull.

Their vessel shuddered and groaned, and Shiro didn’t even curse. He adjusted, compensating for the angle, diverted power from some other system, and kept them just steady enough. But Lance knew they were losing altitude. He knew it was his fault, because this stupid fucking third-rate shuttle’s targeting was off by too many degrees and he wasn’t accounting for it well enough. His hands flew across the controls, bending the targeting system manually by the ever-changing angles, and before he could choke out an apology, Shiro spoke again.

“You can do this.”

Lance fired. The fourth fighter was swallowed in a cloud of fire before it hit the ground. His heart was slamming against his eardrums. One more.

He missed the next shot. The fifth fighter didn’t. The shuttle bucked and rattled and began to tip to one side, and Lance finally heard Shiro curse, just audible under the alarms.

“We’re going down. Lance,  _now_.”

There was only a second of clarity. Only a second when he knew the off-target reticle was aligned with the last ship chasing them. He took it.

Galra fighter number five cracked open and fell to pieces over the valley, and they didn’t have time to celebrate.

“Lance, come here  _now_ ,” Shiro ordered, so Lance jumped up from his seat without question. He was in a quaking, fast-falling piece of shit shuttle with nothing on which to brace himself, but he obeyed. He was blessed with another surreally calm second of getting to watch Shiro pilot.

He felt the drag of the deceleration parachute behind them, watched Shiro throwing every last thing the ship had into slowing them down. He saw the ground closing in. He reached out to protect himself from the incoming crash, and Shiro grabbed his arm.

Shiro shoved the one clunky emergency helmet in the shuttle over Lance’s head.

In the instant the base of the hull made contact with the ground, the shuttle creaked and began to tip forward on its nose. The treeline they were aimed for did something to keep the shuttle from flipping entirely, but in the moment of impact, Shiro slammed his hand on one more control.

The windscreen flew open. He gripped Lance around his middle, and the two of them were thrown out the front of the shuttle in its sudden stop.

They tumbled out of the shuttle far enough to avoid the wreck. The cockpit crushed itself and started to smoke. Shiro was the one to crack his head against the base of a tree.

Lance was scratched and bruised, and that was it. His helmet had scraped loudly against a rock, but he had rolled back into Shiro’s chest, undamaged.

“Shiro!” Lance yelped and dumped the helmet off his head, and he scrambled up on the grass to take Shiro by the shoulders. His eyes were closed. There was blood at the corner of his mouth and more at his temple. Lance’s hands shook, but he cradled Shiro’s head and tried not to move him too much. “Shiro, come on, talk to me.”

Lance could ask, but Shiro wasn’t going to answer. And as tempting as it was to sit there and cry, Lance’s emergency training clicked to life. He lay Shiro down properly under the tree, and he tossed the glove off of his hand so he could feel under Shiro’s jaw for a pulse. When he found it, his breathing hitched with relief. He felt for the rise and fall of Shiro’s chest, and then he gently lifted Shiro’s eyelids. His pupils didn’t shrink under the exposure to light, but they weren’t dilated, either. His neck didn’t appear injured. No bones appeared broken. Unconscious. Breathing. Almost certainly concussed. Not dying.

The others would be able to find them, and when Lance remembered exactly how, he had to pat down Shiro’s borrowed armor for whichever pocket held the transmitter. He found it close to his waist, and he opened the small control to send out the rescue code. It was an archaic piece of shit, but it was all they had. He turned on the device’s locating signal, which would relay to the transmitter’s counterpart with the rest of the team. That done, all Lance could do was wait for a response and take care of Shiro.

He would have to move him. The Galra would be able to catch up and find them easily if they stayed this close to the crash. Moving would only buy them time if the Galra really were determined to find them, but it was their only option. Lance checked Shiro’s breathing again for his own peace of mind, apologized to Shiro under his breath, and then readjusted him on the forest floor.

In one quick heave, Lance pulled Shiro up by his knees, hooked his arm under Shiro’s thigh, and rolled Shiro onto his back with hip over his shoulder and his arm locked around his leg. Lance hooked his other arm around Shiro’s bicep, and once he was on his feet with Shiro’s dead weight on his back, Lance let out exactly one second of astonished laughter. He had actually lifted Takashi Shirogane. He was over six feet of dense muscle, but he wasn’t  _that_ heavy once Lance had him braced.

There was nothing to salvage in the smoking wreckage, and Lance wasn’t going to wait for it to start burning in earnest. The landscape was damp from recent rain - it even smelled like rain - and Lance could only hope that would keep any fire from spreading. His first priority was Shiro and getting him somewhere safe.

The ground was soft under his shoes, and it made footing difficult as he carried Shiro into the woods and down a slope. The best thing he could do was to look for cover and water, and as he worked deeper into the trees, the former was plentiful and the latter was all but guaranteed.

Lance’s heel slipped in the mud. His calf lurched downward to follow it, and Lance braced himself for both of them to fall down the next slope, but his foot caught on a jutting root, found sudden stability, and stopped. He stood there, heart pounding and body tense, and his fingers dug into Shiro’s leg and arm. They hadn’t fallen. They were okay.

Shiro groaned on his back. Lance almost slipped again.

“Hey, Shiro, you okay?” His voice cracked, and he picked his next steps carefully to get them down the slope.

“Lance?” Shiro sounded nauseated. His arm twitched against Lance’s chest, and the flexible black material of his thumb brushed his waist.

“Yeah, man, it’s me. I got you.” Shiro was awake again, sort of, and Lance’s internal dialogue plunged into second-guessing himself. He was probably doing all of the  _wrong_ things in an emergency situation. Shiro might have chosen to do something smarter.

Shiro hummed again, the sound loose and tired. “Did this for you once.”

“Yeah.” Lance’s laugh caught on something. They were back on even ground, and Lance saw a break in the trees ahead of them, leading to something blue and white. “Yeah, you did.”

“Oh,” Shiro uttered. His arm moved again, testing its independence without making a fuss. Another soft, bemused hum. “You’re strong.”

Lance’s heart jumped clear into his skull.

“Thanks,” he laughed, feeling ridiculous and winded from the exercise. “So are you. You hit your head pretty bad, though. How do you feel?”

“Concuss… Concussion.” Lance could imagine Shiro squinting in concentration, with the labor in his words. “No fractures. Feeling some vertigo. Hit my head. Lance, I think I hit my head on something.”

“I know,” Lance agreed gently. The break in the trees widened, and Lance could see the river clearly. It looked close to two hundred feet across, and the bank was a grassy slope dotted with white flowers. It was too scenic for a situation this disastrous. “I know. We’re gonna get you patched up. The others are looking for us. Keep talking to me, Shiro.”

“Oh,” Shiro mumbled a second time. He was slack over Lance’s shoulders, and when Lance stopped under a tree with broad, reaching limbs to set him down, Shiro did his best to help move himself. He fumbled and tipped to one side, and Lance had to turn and catch him to prevent him from hitting his head again. Lance was left kneeling, cradling Shiro under his head and shoulders, with Shiro looking up at him with glazed eyes.

Lance lay him down in the grass and took his hands off of him. Shiro looked slightly more distressed.

“Lance,” Shiro whispered. There was sunlight in his hair, stretching through the canopy above them just for the privilege of caressing Shiro’s face, and his warm grey eyes caught that light and made it glow brighter. Lance wanted to wipe the drying blood off of the full frame of his mouth. He looked like an angel, a divine warrior in repose, victorious at the end of a long battle.

And then Shiro’s face crumpled, and he turned onto his side to dry heave.

“Oh, Shiro–” Lance reached out and rubbed his back, and Shiro whined in the base of his throat until his stomach stopped turning. He clutched weakly at the grass, and the corners of his eyes were damp.

“Don’t feel good,” Shiro breathed.

This was the same man who carried the team on his shoulders. This was the man who commanded the gravity of the sun when he flew, confident and steady and strong. He had kept them alive and given them a chance when they had crashed. He had kept Lance safe above himself. And there he was, prone and fragile. Lance had never seen him weak. It occurred to him that he  _still_ hadn’t seen Shiro weak.

There was little for him to do but follow his instincts, pull Shiro’s head and shoulders onto his lap, and brush his hair back from his face. Shiro closed his eyes and started to relax.

“We’ll stay here for a while,” Lance assured him quietly. “We’ve got the filtering canteen for drinking water, if you can keep it down. Try to rest.”

Shiro murmured something. He was all but melting under the even strokes of Lance’s fingers through his hair.

“Gonna fall asleep.”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do,” Lance reminded him with a snort. They didn’t have any time for the myth about people dying when they fell asleep on a concussion; the body recovered best when it slept. “I’ll wake you up in a little to check on you. The others are on their way.”

Shiro allowed himself another tired hum. His hair was soft under Lance’s fingers. His eyelashes were dark on his cheeks, and his breathing slowed steadily. Lance held him there under the wide, sprawling tree, checked on the transmitter and sent out another signal, and watched the river move.

After a couple of vargas, Lance roused Shiro to make sure that he wasn’t getting any worse. Shiro blinked up at him from his lap, and Lance only regretted that this would be his only chance to enjoy that image. He looked beautiful, like he trusted him.

“Lance?” Shiro whispered, and Lance smiled down at him. Shiro searched his eyes, parted his lips, and smiled back. Astonishingly, he looked shy. “I think I hit my head.”

“I think you did,” Lance laughed quietly. He tested his luck and pet Shiro’s hair again. “Do you remember what happened?” Shiro rolled his head side to side to shake it. “That’s okay. I’ll fill you in later. We finished our mission, and the only part left is our ride back. They’re on their way.”

“Hmm.” Shiro blinked slowly, but he maintained his eyes on Lance’s. “Whatever happened, this is… This isn’t too bad.” He swallowed. “Right here. It’s nice out here. The river.”

Lance caught his breath. Everything in him fluttered with nervous energy. Even when he heard the hum of the castle sweep closer to them, he didn’t want to look up and miss a moment of Shiro looking back at him like that.


	8. Go through me - Hunk/Keith

Their fight with the Galra wasn’t over, and Keith had known that they couldn’t stay on Earth forever. As the Black Paladin, Keith had to rip his team away from their families and throw them back into danger, but they couldn’t afford to let Haggar slip away again. They were finally, finally so close to unraveling just one of her projects. It had taken them months to find this facility, and the moment they had discovered the dozens of captives slaving under the druids and soldiers stationed there, their mission was set for them.

It would take Pidge’s technical and Allura’s arcane knowledge to dismantle the core of the facility. Lance went with the two of them, navigating and backing them up. Their team was fast and keen.

Keith and Hunk went with the captives. There was one pod large enough for the evacuees, and it was the only way the paladins would be able to get them off of the facility before security would come crashing down on them. That had been the intent, anyway.

The pod had launched. Keith held onto that shred of satisfaction, knowing that the prisoners had escaped, but it didn’t do much to comfort him when their own way out slammed shut in front of them. The pod was safe, but he and Hunk were still in the sick grey scaffolding and echoing rooms of the research facility. The alarms were screaming, the soldiers were thundering down every hallway, and they were boxed into this wing of the facility.

They ran. Their choices were to either stay put and die, or fall back and be herded around corners by the next group of soldiers pursuing them. Hunk got a good shot at them in one of the cargo rooms, and the explosion of crates and fire over the dozens of galra was enough to slow them down for a little bit. Keith had looked forward to getting a head start, but from the chaos, one of the soldiers’ rifles fired. The blast cut through Hunk’s armor. Running was much more difficult with an injured calf.

Hunk didn’t complain past the initial cry of pain and a dismayed, “Oh, come on.” Keith pulled his shield in front of the two of them, and he pulled Hunk’s arm over his shoulder to steady him. They limped at a jog, fighting to find a way around the maze of locked doors, traps, and armed guards.

There was one doorway left for them to fall back through. It was something. A chokepoint. The most defensible position they had. The door on the other side of that small room was locked and barred, but it would lead out of the cargo wing and into a passage they might be able to escape through. It was their only hope. Keith shoved a few stacks of crates in front of the doorway for cover, but the galra would close in fast. He had grabbed a rifle off of one of the first sentries they had encountered, and he braced it against his shoulder and watched the opposite hallways from his feebly fortified position. As long as his crate wall cut off the galra’s line of sight to Hunk, they might have a chance.

“Hunk, I need you to get that door open.”

“I can’t just hack it open like Pidge.” Hunk’s voice was frayed and exhausted, tight with anxiety while he was obviously scrambling through their options.

“I don’t need you to open it like Pidge. I need you to open it like Hunk,” Keith snapped at him, and he prayed that he sounded leaderly and inspiring. “You can do this. Find a way.”

He shut up the instant he saw the soldiers turn the corner. He tucked himself as far behind the crates as he could, and he waited until the galra started toward their little fortified doorway. Then he opened fire.

“Core team,” he barked through the comms. “Hunk and I are pinned down in the cargo wing. Galra forces are too many here. Do not come on foot. Hunk is injured. We need extraction as soon as you can get to your lions.”

“Hunk is injured?” was Lance’s immediate question. “How badly? What happened?”

“Just a graze!” Hunk protested, but Keith corrected him.

“Gunshot through his calf. Walking looks painful, and he’s bleeding a lot.”

Keith was holding them off. At least the galra were finding their own fortified positions for the firefight instead of rushing out all at once, but whenever any of them strayed out from cover too long, Keith would take the shot. In a stroke of dumb luck, he heard the click of a grenade being set before it even left its owner’s hand. Their little fortress couldn’t afford it, so Keith shot and detonated it before the soldier could throw it.

It was ugly, but it would keep them safe for a few more minutes.

“I have your location,” Pidge’s voice cut in. “Allura and I aren’t done with this core yet. It looks like it’s only clear up here because everyone in the building’s zeroed in on you.”

“If we abandon the core before we’ve destroyed it, the facility will keep all of us locked in,” Allura warned them. “Keith, how long do you think you can hold them off?”

“Maybe ten minutes.” Keith grit his teeth and watched as the galra across the hall started to get braver. One of them ran straight for him, and though Keith took him out quickly, the boldness was unnerving.

“Screw that,” Lance spat. “I’m going after them. You two stay here.”

“Lance,” Hunk urged him, “no. You have to stay there with Allura and Pidge. Keith and I can do this.” Hunk’s moment of nervous quiet had Keith glancing back at him over his shoulder. Hunk was leaning heavily against the wall where Keith had left him, tearing through the contents of the nearest crates to him in search of something that could help them. His wide brown eyes met Keith’s, and his voice fell quieter. “We can do this, right?”

A line of heat ripped across Keith’s cheek. He snarled and ducked his head, and he tapped the graze with the back of his glove to see it come back red. He put all of his attention back on the hallway in front of them, and he struggled to ignore the sick, scared noise Hunk made.

“We can do this,” Keith told him anyway. “Just focus on getting us un-cornered. I’ll keep you safe.”

“You promise?” Hunk asked, and Keith caught the feeble edge of an attempt at lightheartedness.

“I promise. Take that door apart.”

Another graze. This one hit the back of Keith’s glove. He growled in pain, but he could only take so much cover while maintaining his line of sight on his targets. He heard Hunk rattling with something behind him and the stack of crates, and he heard a low, tired grunt of pain.

Keith wasn’t sure he would make it all the way through the ten minutes.

The next hit he took tore a smoking line through the rifle in his hands. The metal emitted a low, broken whine, and Keith growled and tossed it aside in favor of his bayard. So much for holding them off at a distance.

“Hunk, hurry.”

“I’m trying!” Hunk shoved against something. Crates scraped across the floor.

“Can’t you just blast through it?” Keith pressed, even though he knew the answer. The galra had caught onto the fact that he didn’t have a ranged weapon at hand anymore, and they were closing in fast.

“We’re in a pretty enclosed space right now!” Hunk shouted back. “Unless you want me to blow up the door  _and_  us, nope.”

“Well, do  _something_!”

“Stop yelling! I’ve got something!” With a loud clang, Hunk adjusted a new tool from one of the crates, and he let out a victorious little shout. “Give me half a minute! We’ve got this!”

Keith couldn’t afford to leave his cover. If he went out in the open, he would be shot down. But if he stayed, the fight would come into the room. Hunk couldn’t run. He didn’t have much time to weigh his options, but he did have to engage the first galra to reach the doorway. He fought him at the threshold and barely had time to shove the body off his sword before he was entangled with the next one.

A shot made it past him.

It only grazed Hunk’s shoulder. Keith’s eyes followed the thin line of blood on Hunk’s arm, and he met his eyes for a fraction of a second.

He paid for the moment of distraction with a shot in his shoulder.

Keith cried out, and then Hunk did. He saw Hunk reach for his bayard, but Keith took the head off of the guilty sentinel and shoved the next one back.

“Hunk, the door! I’ll take care of this!”

Keith didn’t have a choice but to believe himself. Hunk had to get the door open, because then Hunk could get away. Even if Keith had to stay and hold them off, Hunk had to get away.

Keith had pulled him away from Earth again. Hunk was going to make it back.

Hunk seemed to realize what Keith had in mind the moment before Keith followed through on it. He heard Hunk’s voice behind him as he stepped through the doorway, out from behind his cover. Hunk said Keith’s name. He said it again, louder, scared. He told him no, told him to wait, and then Keith slapped the wall panel, and the door shut behind him. Hunk was in that small room alone, but now he had the cover he would need to get the escape route open. And Keith would guard the door.

It was a bad call, but it was the only one Keith could have made. And it worked, as far as he was concerned. He never let them past him. Even when their rifles tore through his armor, starting at grazes and then finding muscle and sometimes bone, he didn’t let them past him.

The sheer number of them was overwhelming. Keith thought back almost fondly to the trials of the Blades of Marmora. The Blades hadn’t been actively trying to kill him; they might not have cared if he had died, but they didn’t particularly care if they let him live, either. But the Blades were also better fighters than the typical soldier or sentry. Keith had survived the Blades, and he would survive this.

He hoped so. Surviving sounded pretty difficult with the sudden, earth-stopping pain in his stomach.

His head tipped downward. He could see the blood slipping out of him, and he could feel it running down his back. The soldier had shot him point-blank, and it had gone right through him.

The Blades had said something during his training about these cases. If he was ever on a mission where a fellow Blade suffered this kind of injury and he assessed that medical help was more than so many vargas away, he was to show them mercy and end it.

The vertigo hit him fast. He wheeled and fell, and his shoulder and head met the floor with what sounded to him like another gunshot. His stomach wanted to heave, and it just made his body clench painfully around the hole in his chest. His heartbeat was already starting to jump and flutter.

Hypovolemic shock. Wonderful. That had been in the training, too.

Keith gagged on the pain and forced his head up anyway. He refused to die helplessly, and he locked eyes with the soldier above him. The gun was aimed at him again. He clenched his hand on his bayard.

Keith lashed out. The soldier may have lost a couple of fingers, but Keith got a gun out of the exchange. He gripped it with his clumsy, shaking fingers and finished the soldier quickly. He tried to stand up, but the best he could do was push himself with his heels and slide himself back across the floor, leaving a road of smeared blood. His back hit the door, and he braced himself there, still firing at the blurry figures trying to close in on him.

They never got past him.

The door opened behind him. He lost his support and fell backward, and his head hit the floor again, but he did see Hunk standing over him. He could hear him, his warm voice angrier than Keith had ever heard it. He couldn’t tell who Hunk was yelling at, but he got the feeling it was him.

He recognized Hunk’s bayard firing. There was light, heat, noise in the big room where too many soldiers and sentries still were, and then Keith was being lifted off the ground. He whined against the pull of every injury in his body, and he knew that he was completely limp, dead weight, but Hunk didn’t pause for a second. The door shut again, and Hunk only needed one strong arm to hold Keith on his shoulder while he attached something to the door. It whirred and clicked with a note of security, and then Hunk was carrying Keith through the room and through the space where the reinforced door used to be.

“You got it open,” Keith said around the pennies in his mouth.

“Yeah.” Hunk moved him gently in his arms to cradle him. It was better than being hauled around like a sack of broken Keith. “Turns out I just had to melt the corners of the doorframe. I found a pretty kickass blowtorch.”

The room did feel hotter as they passed through it. The hallway beyond it felt freezing by comparison, or maybe that was just Keith. He shivered and cringed against his own sudden sweating - a bad sign.

“Hunk,” he said quietly. It felt like a whimper in his throat. Hunk picked up his pace through the halls, and Keith realized that he was running. Time felt weird. Each jostle of his body felt weird. Every other step was uneven while Hunk forced his injured leg to keep working.

“Yeah, Keith?”

Keith couldn’t remember what he had been trying to say. He thought it had been important. It felt important. Hunk was important.

He fought a war with his eyelids. They wanted to slip shut, but he wanted to see Hunk’s face. He found it in him to raise his hand and touch Hunk’s cheek. And then his eyelids won.

.

That was the difference between the Blades of Marmora and the Voltron paladins: the Blades would give their companions some swift mercy, but the paladins made each other bear it and suffer. The Blades cut off and left behind liabilities, but if one paladin didn’t make it out, none of them did. The five were one.

That vague piece of imagery was the only thing in Keith’s head. He thought about the colors of the lions, but all he could see was black.

When he opened his eyes, he saw yellow.

Hunk was sitting right beside him, wearing his soft yellow shirt instead of his armor. His eyes were red at the corners and dark under the lids, and they were so big and brown and worried that Keith had to stare dumbly at them, trying to process how someone could look so soft.

“Hi,” Keith said with more breath than voice.

Hunk answered with a weird, sad little noise. He set one hand over Keith’s, and Keith glanced down at himself to find out what he was lying on - or  _in_. Someone had set him in the healing pod, and once he actually looked around, he recognized Black’s cargo bay. Keith found that he could turn his hand, though he was sure his wrist had been broken before, and he curled his fingers around Hunk’s.

“What happened? Everyone okay?”

“Everyone’s fine.” Hunk smiled down at him, but his eyes crinkled at the corners too much like a flinch. “You scared the shit out of us, though.”

“The pod?” Keith pressed.

“The refugees are fine. We escorted them to a coalition base where they can all get trips back to their families.”

“The core?”

“Blew up. Allura wore it down with– I don’t know, whatever her alchemy stuff told her to do, and Pidge shut down its support structures. Then they put bombs around it anyway. Allura held off the druids, too, and Lance actually landed a hit on one of them. It was crazy.”

“Your leg?”

“I’m  _fine_ , Keith. Allura looked at it.”

Keith wasn’t convinced. He frowned. “Haggar?”

Hunk shook his head. “Haven’t heard anything from her. Don’t worry about that right now, Keith. You’ve been out for a few days.”

“Days?” Keith started and sat up, and he winced at the dull but very present pain in his stomach. He patted at his chest and found the skin under his suit intact.

“Whoa, stop,” Hunk begged him. When he took hold of Keith’s shoulders to steady him, Keith didn’t deny the support. When the dizziness hit him, Keith allowed himself to slump into Hunk’s shoulder. “Take a break. You still need to recover. You shouldn’t have pulled that stunt in the first place. You almost died.” Hunk’s voice hitched, and then he fell quiet. He said it again, soft and miserable. “You almost died.”

Keith mumbled something stubborn in his throat, but Hunk was warm and he smelled nice. Like clean laundry and cinnamon. He relaxed and turned his face into Hunk’s shoulder.

“Have to get you home,” he mumbled. Hunk’s answer was immediate.

“I’m not going home without you.”

Keith’s eyes opened. He didn’t know when he had closed them. He lifted his head again, and his face was very close to Hunk’s. What little blood his body had left rushed to his cheeks.

Hunk was staring back at him. He looked like he had stopped breathing. His arms made no move to let Keith go, but he didn’t seem like he was going to pull him closer. Keith took that task upon himself. He barely had to tilt his head forward, and he felt for any positive or negative cues when, tentatively, he brushed his lips over Hunk’s.

Positive. Very positive. Hunk’s hands came up to hold the back of Keith’s head, and for one minute, Keith’s pain melted away. All he had to think about was just how soft Hunk’s mouth was, how nice it was to have his arms around his shoulders, and how Hunk tasted like toothpaste while Keith probably tasted like cryopod and stale sweat. Hunk was generous and didn’t seem to mind.


	9. Facing their phobia - Keith and Lance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content warning: claustrophobia

The only light they had was the glow of their suits. The narrow passages of the cave system echoed the light oddly, and it made Keith’s face look more disgruntled and haunted than usual. That was all Lance could see, standing chest to chest with him in the narrow split of rock that harbored them. This tiny passage in the caves was their escape route from the main caverns, and Lance could still hear the beast shrieking and scrabbling at the walls further in.

Still panting, he brought up his wrist guard to project the map of the cave system. He let out a heavy sigh of relief.

“This is a good way out,” he told Keith. “All we’ve got to do is follow this path to the surface. It’s gonna be a tight squeeze, but Big Ugly back there can’t fit through any of these tunnels.”

When he looked up, Keith was frozen.

He had noticed Keith had been tense the whole time they were in the tunnels, but Keith was almost always tense. That wasn’t supposed to be unusual. But Lance had never seen that look on his face before, wide-eyed, white-lipped, and staring into middle space. He seemed on the verge of tears.

“Keith?” Lance asked, a verbal tap.

Keith’s eyes darted up to Lance, and he nodded.

“Yeah. Back to the surface,” Keith muttered. He took a deep breath and vented it into a hard sigh, and he turned his head to survey the decreasing space of the tunnel ahead of them. Lance didn’t like the look of it, either, but they had to do what they had to do. Their map and scanners reported that this was a viable route, so Lance knew they wouldn’t get stuck in any dead ends, and all of the passages would be transversable. It would be unpleasant, but they would be fine, and then it would be behind them.

“We’ll get stuck,” Keith declared anyway. “We should go back the way we came in.”

“So you wanna fight the giant, hungry cave monster?” Lance scoffed.

“We can take it.”

“Its teeth are bigger than my arm.” Lance was shocked that he had to remind Keith of that.

“Yeah,” Keith allowed. “But we have jetpacks.”

“Which Allura told us not to use in this ancient sacred cave system. We’re not fighting the angry god-monster, Keith.”

Keith grimaced and sent another glance down the passage, and then it finally hit Lance.

“You’re scared of small spaces,” Lance said.

It wasn’t an accusation, but Keith took it like one.

“I’m not scared,” he bit out.

“Man, you’re literally shaking.”

Keith couldn’t argue with that. He stared back at Lance and faltered. He only flinched a little bit when Lance reached out to touch his arm.

“Hey, it’s alright.” Lance lowered his voice, and he made sure that there was nothing teasing in his eyes. Keith didn’t deserve to be made fun of, at least, not right then. Lance wasn’t that much of a dick. “I’ll go first. If I can fit through, so can you. I’ll talk you through it.”

Lance wasn’t used to the look on Keith’s face in that moment. He didn’t want to get used to it. He seemed like he wanted to frown, but couldn’t quite muster up enough distrust for Lance to manage it. By the time Lance’s mouth had run dry with anxiety, Keith nodded.

“Okay,” Keith whispered.

“Okay.” Lance smiled for him, and he slipped ahead of Keith in the tunnel. It was easier once they weren’t taking up the same breadth of space. He reached backward to offer his hand to Keith, but that did make Keith frown.

“I don’t need my hand held,” Keith mumbled.

“Alright, man.” Lance shrugged and continued forward. The passage narrowed in front of him, but Lance could see the light reflecting through the cracks, promising a wider space again beyond the squeeze. He had to turn sideways to slide through, but with only a little bit of wriggling and stretching up on his toes, he made it past. He looked back to Keith expectantly.

Keith had his jaw clenched. He was obviously unwilling to hesitate when Lance had made it through with so little trouble, but his motions were jerky and forced. He turned sideways like Lance had, but as soon as his back and the front of his thighs touched the walls of the tunnel at the same time, his breathing hitched and his frame went rigid. He held still like he was waiting for the walls to recede. His eyes clenched shut.

Lance reached out and took his hand anyway. Keith grunted in surprise and discomfort, but his fingers clenched around Lance’s hard enough to pop one of his knuckles.

“Keith, hey,” Lance said. He knew how to talk soothingly, though this was probably the first time he’d used this voice on Keith. “Look at me. You’re almost through. It’s wider out here, okay? You’re not stuck. Look at me.”

Keith was shaking badly, but he turned his head and looked at Lance through the visor of his helmet. His eyes were wide and dark and shiny.

“You’re doing good,” Lance went on. “But you’re tensing up. That’ll make it harder to move. Deep breaths, then breathe out, and come towards me, okay?”

It took another minute. That narrow space was perhaps three feet long and roughly one foot across, and only just tall enough for Lance to have slipped through, but Keith braved it. When he did stumble through, Lance caught him on one shoulder and patted his back.

The tunnel kept doing this to them. It would occasionally give them a wider chamber to stretch in, but the next path would be even slimmer or more awkwardly shaped. A couple of times, Lance nearly got stuck in them, especially across the inflexible breastplate of his armor. Even when he started to get nervous, he knew that behind him Keith was doing his best to suppress his panic. Lance had to make this look easy. He had to make it look  _not_  scary. So he worked his way through it and exuded as much calm as he could.

In all that time, Keith couldn’t let go of Lance’s hand again.

It was in the seventh narrow space that Keith got stuck.

Lance had wormed his way through, if awkwardly, but Keith wasn’t quite as slender as Lance was. Keith had a bit more muscle mass, and that was enough to catch him across the chest between two surfaces of stone.

He halted, and a horrible, tiny whimper pulled out of him. His fingertips threatened to bite through their gloves and into Lance’s palm.

“Lance,” he choked out. He made an effort to move and barely scraped an inch forward. Lance saw the moment the panic started to tear through him. He could hear the weak rasping in his breath.

Lance knew what he had to do, so he pulled back a little further to readjust his grip on Keith. He started to extract his hand from Keith’s, and Keith’s fingers only tightened. His head turned, and his eyes locked onto Lance’s. The tears were pouring out of them.

“Lance, please, don’t, don’t leave me,  _please_.”

Oh, god. His mom had always called him empathetic, but that wasn’t a bonus right then. Lance mentally shook off the sting behind his eyes. He’d never meant to make Keith cry. He hadn’t really known that was possible.

“Oh, shit, Keith, I’m not leaving you,” he rushed to reassure him, breathless with shock. “I wouldn’t do that. I’m gonna pull you through, okay? But I’ve got to get your arm. Can you hold onto my wrist, and I’ll hold yours?”

Keith wasn’t breathing right, and his arm was trembling, but he nodded. When Lance gripped his wrist, Keith held on tight in return.

“Deep breath, buddy,” Lance reminded him, and Keith shakily complied. “Breathe out in three, two, one.”

He pulled as hard as he dared. He had to move Keith, but he didn’t want to dislocate his shoulder in the process. It was enough, though, and then Keith was falling out of the crevice and stumbling into the chamber with Lance.

He was sobbing. Keith dumped his helmet off his head, and he bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to draw in a full breath beyond the awkward, ugly hitching in his chest. Lance couldn’t leave him alone with that, so he put a hand on the small of his back, just under his armor. Keith startled at the touch, but then he was straightening up to face Lance.

Lance didn’t know what to do. He was moving on intuition, so he took both of Keith’s hands. That didn’t feel like enough, so he pulled Keith closer and hugged him.

Keith buried his face in Lance’s shoulder. His arms wrapped around him, and Lance felt his fingers digging into the back of his shoulders. Lance rubbed Keith’s back in return.

“Hey, buddy, it’s just me,” Lance whispered, and Keith nodded mutely. He was still trying to steady out his breathing, and Lance gave him as much time as he needed. “It’s just me. We’re almost out. Then we’re gonna find a huge field to run around in. I’m pretty sick of this place.”

Keith gave him a weak little laugh and another nod. He wasn’t ready to pull back yet, and Lance just hoped that being hugged made the space outside of their own feel bigger. Maybe this could trick Keith’s body into thinking they had more than a foot on either side of them to move around in.

Keith was never scared of anything. He rushed into things that left Lance balking with fear, always seemed clinical and detached, acted so roughly and stoically that sometimes Lance had wondered if he really felt anything at all. The unfairness of that thought settled into Lance’s chest. He was holding Keith, letting him cry into his shoulder, comforting him because this was his teammate - his  _friend_ , weirdly enough - and he was scared out of his mind.

Keith took a minute before pulling back. He nodded again and shook off whatever still had him wanting to tense up, and he gathered his helmet up off the floor and slipped it back on.

“Okay.” He sighed and rolled his shoulders. “Okay. Almost out. Let’s get this over with.”

The next stretch of passage was more forgiving. Lance was feeling pretty good about it, especially since their map how close they were to getting out.

And then they turned the corner and saw their last obstacle. The last crevice, with sunlight shining through it, was horizontal. They would have to climb up into it and crawl through.

Keith stopped just inside that last chamber and shook his head.

“Fuck. No. No, no, no. Can’t we get Hunk to dig us out?”

“Ancient sacred cave system,” Lance reminded him. “We’re not supposed to break anything if we can help it. That, and the whole thing would collapse on us if we tried to dig through it.”

At the word ‘collapse,’ Keith looked ready to puke. He looked back through the tunnel they had come through. Would he really rather go through all of that again just to slip past the monster and get out the way they had come?

Lance squeezed his hand. “Keith, buddy, we’re almost out. We can do this.”

Keith stared through the tunnel for another few seconds, turned back to look at Lance, and nodded with the most reluctance he had ever seen in one gesture.

“Okay. Good.” Lance reached up with his other hand and rubbed Keith’s shoulder, and he couldn’t tell whether it served to comfort Keith or not. There was nothing left for him to do but start up the small foothold in the wall, lift himself up, and slide himself into the split in the rock.

Lance wasn’t cozy. He had a healthy, natural amount of fear in this situation, which meant that his whole stomach turned and his muscles tensed up as soon as he was trapped between the floor and the ceiling of this narrow space. But he wasn’t trapped, he reminded himself. He was able to take a deep breath and crawl forward.

“It’s okay, Keith,” he called behind him. “It’s not that bad. Only a little hard to move, but not impossible.” He wouldn’t lie to him, at least.

The crawl was too long a stretch, roughly twelve feet long with hardly any room to shimmy himself around and push himself through. He could hear Keith scraping his way through behind him. It was slow going, but then Lance was out.

The sunlight hit his eyes hard, but there was grass under the cliffside. The split opened up roughly three feet above the ground, and Lance was so happy to tumble out of it and roll onto his back. He laughed, splaying his arms out and taking a second just to look up at the sky. It was blue. He liked blue skies.

“Keith, it’s so much better out here,” he sighed.

“That’s– That’s great, Lance.”

Lance sat up fast enough to give himself a headache. He looked into the split again, and he could see Keith about halfway through. His arms were folded tightly in front of his face.

“Keith, buddy, come on. Look at me.”

Keith did his best. He had to unfold his arms and tilt his head back awkwardly, sideways, since he didn’t have enough room to lift his helmet up. The tears had come back to his eyes.

There was really no other option. Lance crawled back up to the crevice, and he reached both arms into it as far as he could.

He heard the tiniest, most miserable whine. Fingers brushed his own, struggled a little further, and latched onto his hands. Lance gripped him tight, braced his foot against the cliffside, and leaned back.

Keith’s armor scraped against the rock. He only held on tighter. Seconds later, he was falling out of the side of the cliff, directly onto Lance. They both grunted, and then Keith was rolling onto his back, onto his side, gripping at the little blades of grass and laughing in utter relief. It still sort of sounded like crying.

“Thank you.” Keith was still shaking. He sat up next to Lance, looked him in the eye, darted his gaze around as if to make sure no one was watching, and then slipped his arms around him. Keith could give one hell of a cute little hug, once he felt up to it. Maybe he just finally liked Lance enough to give him one. Lance smiled at that little hope and squeezed him into his chest, and Keith whispered it again. “Thank you.”


	10. Tied to a chair - Pidge

Pidge knew that there was only one way to get to the center of the cruiser without a fight. They couldn’t risk an open battle, not with dozens of prisoners aboard, and the other paladins would never give her plan the green light. They didn’t have any other viable plans to offer, but they weren’t going to send Pidge in alone.

So she left alone. She slipped out of the castleship while the team was still debating, and she took a pod. She couldn’t risk Green getting caught up in this little gamble along with her. As soon as she latched the pod onto the side of the cruiser and broke into one of the airlocks, she made as little effort as possible to conceal herself. It didn’t take long for the patrols to find her.

At least she made a show of it. She struggled and cursed at them, but it only took one sentry to grip her by the wrists and drag her behind it. She could have broken free, if she really wanted to. She tried to convince herself of that, more than a little petulantly.

She had a couple strokes of luck. The first was that the patrol hadn’t killed her outright, but of course they hadn’t. The galra were too organized and methodical to allow a captive paladin to die when she could still be used as hostage material. The second was that they did take her to a holding cell towards the center of the ship. From there, it would be easy for her to break out, navigate to a control hub, shut down the automated security systems and surveillance, and open the prison doors to get everyone out. She was banking on the other paladins catching on and infiltrating to draw off the patrols.

They had already heard and shot down her plan. She was just forcing their hand. It was their best chance of rescuing everyone on board, so they would have to forgive her for putting herself at risk.

She had expected to be locked up in a cell. What she hadn’t expected was the chair. She hadn’t seen galra strap their prisoners to chairs before. This would complicate things. As soon as she saw the stiff metal chair and heard the repeating clink of several pairs of cuffs, she struggled in earnest. She wouldn’t be able to wait for the team to bust her out; she had to be able to fight them off and slip out on her own. If that involved dropping a few guards and leaving them tied up in the cell meant for her, so be it.

But that didn’t happen. Pidge shrieked and struggled and cursed at them, but within seconds, her hands were locked at the wrist, connected to the spine of the chair, and her ankles were bound to the legs of it. The soldier who seemed to be the highest ranking even stopped to consider something, and then took her helmet off her head.

So much for communicating with the team, she thought, watching the sentries file out after the soldiers. She lost sight of her helmet between them all, and then the door slid shut in front of her.

New plan, then. Pidge glared at the closed door and assessed her restraints.

The cuffs were simple, just two locks around her wrists with a link of metal chain tethering her to the back of the chair. Nothing she couldn’t figure out. Her ankles were in similar locks.

The room itself was small, tall enough for a galra to stand in comfortably but not so wide for two to lie down one after the other. There was a vent on one wall too small for her to fit through, and the corner of the other wall was equipped with a tiny reflective dot that she knew was a camera. She had expected that much. When she made the effort, she found that she could scoot and turn the chair, but she risked toppling it and being unable to get back up, so she didn’t struggle too much in that regard. She could, however, turn her head to look over her shoulders, as well as lean her head entirely over the short back of the chair.

She didn’t see any other reflective dots. No more cameras. They had no visual of her back. Perfect.

It felt too perfect. She didn’t like that. But she only had so many options.

Green was a little mad. Pidge could feel it even over the distance; Green didn’t like when Pidge left her behind. She always wanted to be involved in Pidge’s schemes. But she wasn’t so mad that she wouldn’t help Pidge when she needed it. When Pidge closed her eyes and called for her bayard, her connection to Green held strong. She felt the prickling of it in her fingertips, and then her bayart materialized in her hand. All she would need was a few minutes.

Angling the blade blindly was both difficult and dangerous. She knew her weapon inside and out, had the shape and weight and proportions of it memorized in the fine muscles of her hands, and her own body’s proprioception extended to it the way it extended her own reach and capability. The issue was that she still couldn’t see what she was doing, and a half inch of error could cost her a finger. So she went slowly.

The first task was to maneuver the blade to press it against the chain of her handcuffs, all without losing her grip on the handle. Her bayard would be able to saw through it, but that wasn’t something she could rush in her awkward position. She braced herself, took a deep breath, and got started.

Her bayard was sharp, but sawing through the metal chain would take forever. The heat it would require to melt the metal would ruin her hands just by proximity, so she couldn’t risk that.

Keith could have cut through it with one hard swing of his sword. Lance could probably shoot through one of the links. Shiro probably could have pinched the chain between his fingers to sever it. Hunk would have just found the key. But Pidge was left with her bayard and a limited range of motion. She loved her bayard - it suited her, light and adaptable - but this was one of those situations to which it wasn’t suited.

She growled under her breath, reminded herself how embarrassing it would be if the others had to rescue her from her own mess, and bore down on the steady sawing motion of her blade.

She had formed a notch in the chain. The blade caught in it and bit deeper, and she could feel that she was almost through it. She bit her bottom lip in concentration and let that motivate her. She could do this.

The door opened. Pidge froze.

The galra soldier at the front of the doorway stared down at her with a dull, detached look closer to boredom than impatience. The soldier behind him regarded her with a little more curiosity, but he was clearly under orders from the first soldier and awaiting his permission to even speak. Pidge held her bayard steady behind her back, and she clenched her teeth, hoping they hadn’t noticed her struggling.

“Your team is on their way to pick you up,” the first soldier said. He made it sound like she was a toddler getting picked up from preschool, and her parents were just running late. She blinked back up at him.

“Oh. I’m glad it’s that easy.” Her voice was dry enough to crack her throat. The soldier raised his eyebrows, the closest he would come to a smile.

“They were all very specific,” he continued. “I’m not to put a scratch on you.” He started to pace around the small space. His steps were very slow, and Pidge dismissed her bayard as silently as she could. She couldn’t afford to have them put her in any new restraints if they noticed the damage she had already done.

“So, of course, you’re not going to follow that rule.” Pidge kept her eyes ahead. She glared at the second soldier still in the doorway, who waited patiently for his commanding officer.

“Why wouldn’t I?” The first soldier made his way around her, and Pidge didn’t turn her head to look at him. She refused to show fear, even when he stood directly behind her.

Her chair jolted. A short cry burst from her, and then she was looking at the ceiling and the galra standing over her. He was gripping the back of the chair over her shoulder, and he had it tipped back at a forty-five degree angle. She clamped her mouth shut and scowled up at his calm face. So much for not showing fear.

“So you’re telling me you’re not a sadistic fuckwad?” she growled. He did smile then, cold and faint.

And then he was turning, walking out of the room, dragging her chair with her in it behind him. The legs of it screeched against the floor, and the sound made her gut clench and her teeth hurt. The second soldier followed behind her chair, obedient and quietly amused. She couldn’t decide which of the soldiers she hated more.

“I didn’t say that,” the one in charge said ahead of her, speaking over the whine of metal under the chair. “Plenty of sadistic fuckwads have called me worse. But a deal’s a deal.”

“What did they offer up in exchange?” Pidge just had to ask.

“Themselves,” he replied. “At first. When I told them what might happen to you if you stayed under my care, each one of them asked for me to take them instead. I guess I made it sound fun.”

“Who are they trading for me?” Pidge spat out. She couldn’t help straining against the chains, not with the idea of her team fearfully bargaining for her life.

“I wanted a paladin at first,” the officer said. “But when I saw how easy it was to get a paladin, I decided I wanted a lion. So I’m taking yours.”

Pidge barked with laughter.

“Green’s not letting you take her,” she snorted.

“I hope that’s not the case. The deal is that I get the Green Lion, and you’re reunited with your team.”

Pidge didn’t like that phrasing. She watched the lackey following them smile, and she counted the lights that they passed, set into the walls and glowing purple.

“Reunited, huh?” she growled.

“Of course.” A turn to the left. Her chair complained and whined against the metal floor. “For a time. I’d like to see which one of you survives the arena. Do you think the Champion might have the heart to carve through any of you, or will you have to put him out of his misery?”

Her bayard was in her hand. It missed the groove she had already carved, caught on a new link, and tore through it.

She screamed and lashed out at the soldier’s wrist. He dropped the chair, and she heaved her weight to one side as it fell. They were already bringing out their guns, and she ducked under her shield while she cut her ankles free. She still had the cuffs with the clattering chains dragging behind her, but it was enough.

Once she was detached from it, Pidge kicked the chair as hard as she could. It was enough to make the lackey stumble over it trying to avoid it, and she dismissed her bayard just long enough to follow up on the vicious impulse to launch herself toward him, grab the chair by the legs, and smash it over his head. The back and seat of the chair bent with the force, and she kept moving. She turned, swung hard, and smashed the remains of the chair into the first soldier’s face. It stunned him long enough for her to recover her bayard, and she slashed at his forearm to make him drop his rifle.

When he snarled and swung his other arm around her, catching her and lifting her up, she turned her bayard and aimed for his throat.

She tripped over both bodies and the chair on her race down the hall. She didn’t route herself toward the containment room, but a few turns past it. She found the auxiliary control room empty; it was likely that her late captor usually manned it. Her hands were shaking and bloody, but she dug her way through the layers of security and protocols as quickly as she could.

Surveillance shut off across the cruiser. Drones and sentries deactivated. Armories locked down. Sleeping crew were locked in their bunks. Fighters locked in their hangars. Secondary and tertiary power cut off. Shutting down the ship’s manual and automated artillery was the hardest part, especially considering her time constraints, but she locked that, too.

It was the most aggressive takeover she had ever made, and the adrenaline made her feel like a god. The alarms were blaring across the whole vessel, and the galra wouldn’t be able to react nearly fast enough.

She found her helmet in the corner of that control room, and she jammed it on over her head before taking off back down the hall.

“Guys?” she shouted, and when she heard their voices over the comms, the relief clenched below her throat.

“Pidge, are you okay?” she heard Hunk crying.

Lance was firm and fearful when he asked, “Where in the ship are you?” and Keith sounded strange and terrified, demanding, “Pidge, what have they done?”

“I’m okay,” she answered quickly. “I’m okay. I got out. I shut down the major systems and I’m on my way to the prison wing. I need someone to dock astern so we can get everyone out.”

“Oh my god, Pidge.” Shiro’s voice was scarcely a whisper. He sounded like she had cut thirty years off of his lifespan. “We’re on our way. Hunk, you dock. Keith, you guard him out here. Lance, you’re with me. We’re going in.”

Tearing through the locks of the prison cells took little time in comparison to the rest. Pidge kept looking over her shoulder, watching for guards to come rushing around the corners, but moved quickly to lead the prisoners to the dock Hunk related to her. As soon as she saw Shiro and Lance bolting through the hall, she saw the same caution in their eyes, watching for sentries that wouldn’t come. A line of prisoners filed into the airlock attached to Yellow, and beside them, the black and blue paladins caught up to her.

Shiro’s breathless, “Katie, thank god,” hit her just as hard as Lance’s hug. She had never before imagined a scenario where Shiro would have to tell her family that he couldn’t bring their daughter back to them, and she realized then that he probably imagined it all the time.

“You guys weren’t really going to give up Green, were you?” Pidge managed to ask around Lance’s shoulder. She felt him laugh, and she squeezed him back in the hug.

“Well,” Lance hummed, “you remember that ‘guns blazing’ idea you didn’t like? Our plan was to grab you, sneak the prisoners off in Red, and then do that.”

She rolled her eyes affectionately and pushed him off of her. The alarms were still screaming around them, and it didn’t feel like the right place for a heartfelt reunion. As the last of the ex-prisoners were slipping into Yellow, Shiro patted her shoulder.

“Don’t ever do that again.” His voice was too gentle for an order, too firm for pleading.

She smiled back up at him. He looked like he needed it. “You’re not a babysitter, Shiro.”

“You’re right.” His returning smile only looked wearier. “But you’re my friend. So don’t ever do that again.”


	11. Cradling someone in their arms - Matt and Katie

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: blood, gore, death

Matt had held her like this when she was a baby. He had sat tucked into the corner of the couch, cradling his infant sister while she burbled and gripped at his shirt sleeve and drooled everywhere like some kind of monster. He had been nine when Katie was born.

The sun-warmed couch was a far cry from this cold, dusty ruin. Matt couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t feel much of anything except pressure, weight, and the inability to suck in a breath. But he could feel Katie tucked against him, wrapped up in his arms, as quiet as sleep. Instead of knitted blankets, they were held together by the same metal spike.

It had torn through their armor, through Matt’s spine under his stomach. The end of it was gleaming red somewhere past Katie’s rib cage.

They had never suffered sibling rivalry. Matt had always been happy to take on his role as an older brother. He had taught her to read before she started talking. He had played with her and built model solar systems with her. He cheered her up when school was tough - not because of the material, but because of bratty kids or teachers who didn’t know their subject as well as she did. All he had ever wanted was to be worthy of that responsibility.

He couldn’t remember the details of the crash. He knew that they had been injured from the fight, and then the jet had gone down. Both of them had burns everywhere. His skin was so raw that his body couldn’t register all of the pain at once, and he couldn’t feel any of it past his waist.

And they had been thrown into the ruins. Katie had lost her helmet. The rubble had hit them first, broken their legs, cracked Katie across the head with a falling stone. And at the corner of the room, an exposed structural spike had caught their momentum.

He was the big sibling. He was responsible. She had followed him all the way out into space to save him, and he had landed them here. It would just take him a little longer to die.

She was tiny. She weighed nothing against him. He still had enough strength to lift his hand. He pet the bloody top of her head, and he could only smell baby hair.


	12. Shaking and shivering - Keith and Lance

Keith and Lance had made it to the rendezvous, little more than a hole in the desert ground where the rebels had stored some supplies. The bombs in the Galra facility behind them had detonated, heralding their mission a success, and they had little more than a few bruises to show for it. Lance had a graze across his side, but it wasn’t anything to worry about. They had disinfected and dressed it, and they took a moment to sit back and breathe. Their ride would be by soon to pick them up.

“Hey, pass me a water?” Lance held out one hand toward Keith, but his head was leaning back against the dirt wall and his eyes were closed.

He took a jar of water from the supply stash and set it in Lance’s palm, and he watched Lance open it with shaky hands and take a single deep gulp. It was in the second that Lance took his mouth off the jar, never having opened his eyes, and didn’t unfurrow his brow that Keith knew something was wrong.

“You okay?”

Lance grunted. “Don’t feel great, but getting shot’ll do that to you.” He set the jar down and hugged himself tighter. “What time is it?”

“About three vargas castle-time.”

“No, I mean, what time is it here? Is it nighttime already?”

Keith regarded him with a touch more caution. That was a peculiar thing to ask when they had only been outside an hour ago. He reviewed Lance again to check for any injury he might have missed.

“No, Lance, it’s early afternoon.”

“Shoot, really?” Lance grimaced and rubbed his arms. Their armor was meant to be well-insulated, but it didn’t appear to be working for him. “Thought deserts were supposed to be hot.”

Keith’s eyes had adjusted to the dim light in the bunker, but he hoped he was seeing wrong. Lance’s face looked strange and pale.

“Feels fine to me.” Keith wasn’t sure how else to answer. He turned to face Lance where they sat. “How much blood did you lose?”

“Mmmm, not a lot.” Lance huffed and clung to his own arms tighter, and he huddled his knees up to his chest. “Keith, I don’t think I feel right.”

Keith was up on his knees and placing himself in front of Lance in the next instant. He cupped Lance’s face in his hands, feeling his forehead and checking his heart rate under his jaw. His skin was clammy.

“How do you feel?” Keith demanded. “You weren’t hit anywhere else?”

“I… I don’t think so?” Lance frowned, and he reached to his side to cradle the bandaged wound. “Feels cold. Everything feels cold.”

Keith pushed Lance’s hand aside to check the wound. It did feel cold, even through the bandage. Lower than human body temperature should be, at least. Keith grabbed his helmet and tapped the comm to life.

“Allura, I think Lance has been poisoned. We have to get him to a pod as soon as possible.”

Allura’s voice grunted over the headset. Whatever fight was happening on her side of the mission, it was a struggle. “Poisoned? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s cold. Shivering and cold to the touch, and he seems a little confused. It doesn’t look like any neurotoxin or hemotoxin I can think of.”

Allura growled something in clicking, otherworldly syllables. “I know what it is. We’ll get to you as soon as we can. Keith, it’s paramount that Lance stays warm. Give him something hot to drink if you can.”

Lance raised his head to look at Keith. He wasn’t used to seeing that kind of fear in his eyes.

“Am I gonna die?”

Allura took seconds too long to answer. “Stay warm, Lance. We’ll be there soon.”

“Oh my god.” Lance groaned and buried his face in his knees. Keith was already scrambling to the emergency supplies.

He found a few things useful amongst the junk: a small portable heater, a stove the size of his bayard (functional, but with no discernable power source), and a couple of thin but dense blankets. He threw one of the blankets around Lance, turned on the heater and set it as close to him as was safely possible, and set a jar of water on the little stove top. While he waited for the water to heat, he took the plates of his armor off, pushed his way into the blanket with Lance, and pulled his off as well. Leaving them only in their black suits, Keith held Lance to his chest and wrapped them up in both layers of blankets. He was stiflingly hot, but Lance was almost enough to cool him down.

Lance’s shivering rattled both of them. Keith was bigger than him, and he hadn’t even noticed until he actually had to hold him this close. He gathered the edge of the blankets around Lance’s neck, and he tucked Lance’s head under his chin.

“This is pretty nice of you,” Lance mumbled.

“What, keeping you alive?”

Lance hummed something neutral and shivered again. It took a few minutes, but when Keith saw steam rising from the jar of water, he turned the stove off and picked up the glass with a gloved hand. He set it aside to let it cool enough for drinking, and he quickly wrapped the two of them up again. Lance sighed with some semblance of comfort.

“Warm,” Lance muttered.

“That’s the idea,” Keith replied.

“No,  _you_.” Another tremor worked through him, and with painful awkwardness, Keith squeezed him tighter to himself. “You’re like a living space-heater.”

“Galra have higher body temperatures than humans,” Keith informed him dryly.

“Mm. Good thing you’re here, then.” Lance’s voice shook on another hard shiver, and Keith pulled the blanket around the back of his head like a hood.

“What kind of poison does this?” he growled under his breath, and Lance mumbled again.

“Dunno. Never snows in Cuba.”

“What?”

“Doesn’t snow.” Lance’s words were beginning to slur together. “Went to Canada once, visit someone’s in-laws. Wanted to take us to the lake.”

The next shiver was so tight and contained that Lance almost choked on it. He cleared his throat and kept mumbling.

“When you fall in freezing water,” Lance said, slow and deliberate like he was aware of how oddly he was speaking, “you can barely move. Everything just…” He sucked in a breath and tensed his body to demonstrate. He went quiet, and Keith’s heart hammered somewhere under his jaw.

“Lance?” he whispered.

Lance admitted another tiny sigh. His body was suffering constant, tiny shivers, and he tucked his hands between their chests. Keith felt his cool breath on his neck when he spoke.

“Never thought I’d be that cold again.”


	13. Doesn't realize they've been injured - Krolia and Kolivan

There was a security in making quick decisions, in ripping off a bandage with no time to second guess, but leaving Earth was a slow process. Each step away from her son’s crib, each mile away from the blue planet’s atmosphere, and each interminable quintant of her journey away from her family gave her ample time to regret it.

Her husband - that was what she had taken to calling him - had helped her prepare the last functional Galra fighter to carry her away. He had loaded her small craft with food and water, and when she had protested for him to keep some of it, he had shrugged and said it was time for him to pick up groceries anyway.

Once she was out of the solar system, heading where she knew a Marmoran base would be, she had little to do but keep her course steady, make sure the fighter was in working condition, and replay her last moments on Earth in her mind.

She had stroked Keith’s dark, downy hair and kissed his cheek. Her husband had walked with her to the ship. She had silently resolved to deny herself one last kiss, because she knew that it would torment her for the rest of her life. That resolve had turned to ash at the grim, aching look in his eyes. He had taken her hand. She had kept her feet on the desert ground for another four painful minutes.

“I’ll wait for you forever,” had been his last words to her.

It wasn’t too late to turn back. She needed to hear his voice again, just to make sure she would always remember it right. She needed to feel Keith gripping her finger with his whole tiny fist just one more time. Maybe she could stay another couple of years. The war would carry on without her, and she still needed to hear her son’s first words. She needed to make sure he knew his mother loved him so much that it could just kill her.

She could go back to that Arizona desert. She might crash again, just to make sure she had no vessel to take her away. She would run back into his arms, and they might just stand there in the nighttime and hold each other for a while in their strong, quiet way. He would take her back inside and make dinner, and she would blow raspberries on Keith’s soft little cheek until he’d laugh and try to grab her nose.

Her resolve wavered. It had never done that before. And when she was standing in front of Kolivan in a dark, cold room, her face made of stone and her hands clenched at her sides, she was still trying to steady it.

“Three decaphoebs,” Kolivan said, “and you found the Blue Lion of Voltron on a planet scarcely entering its space-faring age.”

“Yes, sir.” Krolia stared back at him and didn’t show any weakness. “The ship I arrived in crashed. It was only when the Galra found the lion that I was able to steal one of their ships and return. I can’t be sure that they didn’t send a report to Galra command before I neutralized them.”

A human had been injured in that fight. His arm probably wouldn’t heal right, not with Earth’s primitive technology and its citizens’ limited access to health care. At least for a couple of weeks, he would have to cradle and change and feed Keith with one arm in a sling.

Krolia’s eyes had drifted off. She snapped them to attention, fixing them on Kolivan’s face again, and he frowned at her when he had to repeat himself.

“I said, we need reports on any Galra cruisers venturing into that quadrant. You will help us direct agents to establish bases in Earth’s galaxy.”

“Yes, sir.”

The angle of his frown changed. Krolia hadn’t seen that look on his face since she was a child.

“Krolia.” His voice was never soft, but it was gentle, like when he had found her and given her that name. “You’re shaking.”

She looked down and aside to stare at her hand. She couldn’t even see it shaking past the rest of her body trembling. She blinked at herself, slack-jawed.

“Oh,” was all she could say.

“What happened?”

What words was she supposed to use to answer that? What terms in what order could she possibly use to explain the last three years -  _decaphoebs_  - of her life? Blades didn’t have time for sentiment, yet she couldn’t put her family into the framework of a mission report. They weren’t made of cut and dry details.

And there she was, pulling in one hard gasp against an unexpected rush of tears. Kolivan said her name again, alarmed. She had never cried in front of him before, and she recognized that distantly.

“I’m alright,” she protested, her voice hard. “I’m ready for the mission. I’ll— I’ll help map out the galaxy. Set up stations, scanners. We should— we should make sure to— We should plant false leads for the Galra. Replicate the lions’ signals, give false reports…”

“Krolia. Stop.” Kolivan stepped forward until his hand engulfed her shoulder. He guided her to a bench along the side of the meeting room and instructed her to sit down. She hesitated, and then she slumped down and scrubbed at her eyes. “Little one, what happened?”

An ugly sob worked its way through her. She curled into herself. She couldn’t breathe.

She’d had nightmares when she was on Earth. She would wake him up sometimes, thrashing or sitting up, and he would hold her in his strong arms until she was ready to either talk about it or fall back to sleep. He would call her things like  _baby_ or  _sweetheart_ or  _bunny_ , and he’d let her head rest against his chest where she could listen to his heartbeat, time her breathing to his own.

“The human who found me,” she started. Her teeth were chattering. Her heart was pressed against one wall of her ribcage, still attached to Earth’s gravity and trying to sink toward it. So this was homesickness. “The Earth native. Human. He…”

“What did he do?” Kolivan growled.

“No, he didn’t—” Krolia’s stomach twisted. She was breathing past her shameful crying, but the room was still spinning. She needed to do the dishes when she got home, and Keith wouldn’t be able to sleep until his dad held him on his chest and sang, lulling him with the soft drone of a lullabye.

“I lived with him. He was a fireman, a— a public safety officer, and— We had a child, Kolivan.”

Kolivan was silent. Krolia was still fighting to stop shivering, just because Keith had his dad’s night-blue eyes. When Kolivan put an arm around her shoulders and drew her closer, she buried her face into the top of his chest and fell apart.


	14. Drowning - Keith

Keith was still on the escape pod when it broke through the atmosphere. He was supposed to have turned the Galra craft toward a neighboring system to regroup with the rest of the team, but when his consciousness started to drag itself back into place, he couldn’t be sure how long he had kept them waiting. He could barely be sure of where he was. It was hard to tell past the blur in his eyes and the ringing in his ears. He pushed himself up on his elbows, but he could feel the dead craft careening, dragging him across the cold floor and taking away his last shred of balance. **  
**

An entire wing was gone, ripped away from the shuttle’s shell when its mothership had exploded behind it. That had been enough propulsion to send the broken little pod hurtling into the closest planet, and enough to throw Keith against the side of the cockpit. As the surface closed in, the view through the window was swallowed up in blue.

Water. It was all ocean.

Keith felt a sensory memory of the surface tension of water. Being tripped into a pool. Outstretched arms sinking through the water immediately. One hard, stinging impact across his body before sinking.

He had to get out of the pod.

He scrambled for the dashboard to search through his options– any parachutes, any emergency ejection. The parachute was damaged from the explosion, and the escape command resulted in a weak click and nothing more.

Keith could see the peaks of orange on the waves. The sun was setting, and the water was too close.

He hauled himself up onto the seat and pushed at the emergency hatch above with his own shaking arms. It budged and then stopped.

The whole pod stopped then. Keith was thrown off of the chair, and he hit the wall a second time. He caught himself on his arm, and he heard his forearm crack before he felt the hot rush of pain. He screamed, and all things considered, he forgot to be grateful that he had only broken that much. He forgot much of anything else when he heard the water seeping in.

There shouldn’t have been any cracks in a space-worthy vessel, but the piece of shit hadn’t taken its unexpected entry into the atmosphere very well, and the crash into the ocean surface had gone past the ship’s threshold for stress. The water didn’t flood in all at once. That might have indicated an opening large enough for Keith to fit through. Instead, the water found a crack in the crease of the window. The spray hit Keith in the side of his borrowed armor, painless and chilling.

Keith was used to these solo missions. He was used to facing his own lonely, unmarked grave and talking himself through it rationally. When he heard his own voice, though, his words were just panicked curses.

The water was dragging the pod down. There was some shred of buoyancy left in the damn thing, but as the air escaped and the water filled in, Keith would be dragged down to the hell of an alien ocean floor.

He clutched his broken arm to his chest the best that he could, but nursing it then wouldn’t matter if he didn’t make it out. His good arm grabbed the rifle off of the floor, the only weapon he had managed to steal on his way off of the cruiser, and he steadied it against his shoulder. He would just have to see whether the Galra made stronger weapons or ships. He aimed for the escape hatch and clenched his teeth.

The first bout of shots did nothing. The second had more water pouring into the cockpit.

That was to be expected, Keith reminded himself even as his fingertips went cold with panic. Water would have to come in if he was going to get out. It was fortunate that this planet’s oceans were similar to those on Earth, too; at least Keith hadn’t been dropped straight into a lake of acid or thrown against a solid wall of rock or ice. He had been dropped into a saltwater ocean where death would come slower.

His shoes had trouble finding grip on the wet, crooked floor, and the vessel groaned and tipped to another side. Keith found himself sliding down the floor again as the ship tilted in the water. He screamed and clung to the pilot’s seat with his rifle arm. The pod stank of seawater. The metal rattled and creaked.

He braced the gun again along his shaking arm, and he leaned the shoulder of his injured arm against the seat to stabilize himself. He aimed for the seams of the hatch, and another round of shots only worsened the water intake without fully opening the lid. Even when Keith climbed up and swung the end of the rifle to hit the door, he could feel that it was stuck. Something on the other side had it jammed, but not so tightly that water couldn’t come rushing in. The escape hatch was worse than useless.

The whole pod was tipping itself nose-down. The water pooled below the seat and left the dashboard dark, and it crawled up toward the window. Keith was left with no option but to lean against the back of the seat to keep himself propped up. Even then, the water was halfway up his shins.

The glass shouldn’t break like he wanted it to. It was built to withstand the vacuum of space. But it was already splitting at the corners, so it was Keith’s only real hope. He opened fire at the seams, using the seat for as much cover as he could.

The water came to his knees. The light outside the window was beginning to fade, presenting him with a dark blue with just enough memory of sunlight to miss it. The glass cracked.

The water was at his waist. The air tasted wet and salty and sick. The ocean was dark and bitter beyond the window. The pressure alone might kill him.

The glass splintered and broke. Keith ducked behind the seat, and it saved him from the initial blast of broken glass and chilling water. He took in one deep, hard gasp of the last of his air, and then the water took him over. The crash of it alone made him lose half of that breath. The force of the water hurt, and Keith felt his broken arm worsen, but the ship hadn’t fallen quite as deep as Keith had feared. He had a little more time to live.

Everything was dark. He felt little glass cuts along his exposed cheeks, and he shut his eyes to protect them while he felt his way over the seat with one hand to guide him. He was anything but weightless, but the water left him suspended. When he made it around the seat, he had to open his eyes to maneuver through the shattered window. There was barely enough light to see, and as the pressure wrapped itself around him he felt his eyes ache and a painful burst in his ear, but he pushed himself through the hole in the glass, careful to avoid the edges.

The open, murky dark stretched out on all sides. There was just nothing.

Humans had evolved in hot, open grasslands. Galra had evolved in the desert. This was the wrong biome. Everything about the ocean was wrong. Keith didn’t fit right in its jaws, but it would swallow him anyway.

Anything could swim along and find him.

Exposed and suspended, Keith let adrenaline guide him. He kicked off of the sinking ship and gave himself a small boost toward the thin light of the surface.

He couldn’t swim right. His broken arm throbbed and screamed, and he couldn’t use it to drag himself any higher. His stolen armor didn’t have any propulsion systems to save him. All he could do was kick and fight with his legs.

They might never find his body.

His fingers clawed upward at the light. His hands tried to scoop the water away from him. He tried to part it and send himself back up. It couldn’t feel real that he would never break the surface. He couldn’t imagine never tasting dry air again.

He would eventually dissolve in salt water. There would be nothing to bury.

He wouldn’t last long enough for them to reach him, but still, Keith fumbled with the communicator at his side. All he had was an emergency distress signal to the other paladins. He felt the gentle thrum of it, saw the small pulse of light it gave, and didn’t last another moment without a violent spasm.

His lungs twisted and cried. He only had shreds of stale air left, not enough to get him to the surface. Not enough to fuel him all the way up, especially with his armor weighing him down. He would never make it up with upwards of fifty extra pounds of armor on him. With his chest clenching, begging for air that just wasn’t there, Keith scraped at the clasps of his armor until they fell from his chest, waist, then legs. He was left in a thin undersuit, and as soon as he kicked off the heavy Galran boots, he tried for another surge toward the surface. He didn’t spare the sinking armor another glance, but he kept the small communicator in the hand of his broken, swollen arm.

He made little progress. He used more strength than his legs had. His good arm gave him what support it could, but it didn’t make up for its useless counterpart. His lungs spasmed again, and that time, Keith couldn’t hold his body back from taking in a gulp of water.

It tasted foul. Salty and stinging. It was amazing, how the burn of fluid in one’s lungs ripped away rational thought.

He choked, and his body reflexively tried again, searching for air.

He would only have minutes, if that. The clenching in his chest worsened, squeezing, rejecting the water it took in and then shutting out the rest of it. It burned in his sinuses and tore at his basest reflex, the most immediate need his body had to survive. The water never stopped tearing at his lungs, but when he felt his throat tighten and his chest constrict, he swallowed water until it could make him sick.

The light wasn’t that dim. There would have been tears in his eyes if the water didn’t wash them away immediately, but he could see just enough light, the shimmer of waves distorting the sun above him. He squeezed the communicator until his hand threatened to break, too.

His muscles felt compressed. His lungs were raw and stretched thin. There was so much air above him, and he couldn’t reach it.

The sun receded and flickered out.

 

 

The compressions came back.

His ears hurt. His face was both wet and dry. Someone was counting, associating numbers with each pump of pressure on his ribcage, and then a warm mouth covered his own. More pressure, warm air in his throat. Then another round of even drum beats on his chest.

“Keith,  _please_.”

Whose voice was that?

His ears were ringing. Everything still sounded muted and thrumming, the ugly heartbeat of waves and currents.

A warm hand brushed the wet locks of hair from his forehead. The mouth closed over his again. Whose mouth was that?

He didn’t care. It had saved him, and that was all he needed to know. His chest contracted by itself, and he hauled himself up on his side, forcefully turning himself over on his good arm, and he vomited sea water onto the floor. Several voices shouted his name, and he heard everyone behind him shuffling closer to grab him by the shoulders.

Someone threw a blanket around him. Someone else pulled him back against their chest, and they wrapped him up and held him while he coughed and wheezed. He was still choking on water, and though sitting up made him dizzy, he did find it easier to breathe. Each breath was bookended in shivers. Air tasted strange and wonderful.

“Cold,” he complained. He meant to growl, but his voice came out as a thin, scraping whisper.

“I know, Keith. God.” That was Shiro’s broken little voice. Shiro was holding him. Keith felt him lean closer and press his face over Keith’s shoulder. “Stop scaring me like this.”

“Watch his arm,” Lance pleaded, and Keith opened his eyes, blinking past their stinging dryness to see him sitting much closer than expected. Lance’s face was wet, too, and Keith blinked at him in a daze as he took in the tear tracks on his cheeks and his dark hair, soaked through and dripping.

“We need to get him to the pod,” Hunk cut in. Keith looked aside and saw Hunk’s hand clinging to the edge of his blanket. Hunk seemed unaware of it.

“Arm,” Keith rasped. He looked down at himself only to remember that he was covered by a blanket. Shiro’s one arm was holding it closed over him, and Lance had a hand on his knee. Allura was right there on his other side, fussing with some weird little conical device, and he heard Pidge’s shaking voice behind him, updating someone on the situation. Keith was still catching up, and his first concern had to be that they hadn’t shown him mercy and cut his arm off while he was unconscious.

“I know,” Allura said softly. “Let me see it.”

Keith mumbled protestations. He tried to tell them not to move his arm, not to move him at all, but Shiro was already unwrapping his right side from the blanket. Allura gingerly guided Keith’s arm from his chest, and he whimpered and started to clench his teeth. Bitching about it wouldn’t help. He would have to endure it. Allura popped the little device in half with a click, and he saw that she had taken the cover off of a needle.

Keith groaned, shut his eyes, and turned his head away from her. Lance squeezed his knee. Something wet and cold swiped over his shoulder - he realized the arm of his suit had been cut off of him - and a pinch followed.

“It will help with the swelling and recovery,” Allura explained, and she capped the needle and wrapped his arm against a splint. “How do you feel?”

“Great.” Keith’s stomach turned, and his body lurched forward again. Lance moved out of the way and put a hand on his shoulder instead, and Keith coughed viciously enough to make him sick again.

“Okay, Keith,” Shiro said once the coughing stopped. “Let’s get you home to Black.” He wrapped his arm under Keith’s unbroken left one, and when he stood, he helped pull Keith to his feet. Keith heard himself let out a weak, pained moan, and he couldn’t quite keep his head from lolling to one side.

“Where’s Black?”

“Still at the outpost,” Shiro answered, and Keith finally looked further than the people around him at his surroundings. They were all packed into the small hallway between a familiar lion’s cockpit, its cargo bay, and the entrance ramp.

“Red?” Keith mumbled.

“Yeah, buddy.” Lance smiled at him, but Keith still thought he looked like he’d cry. “We couldn’t find you after the cruiser… And we couldn’t get a response from you, but you had your communicator, so…”

“We all came in the fastest lion,” Allura finished for him. “And we should  _return_  in the fastest lion.”

“Right.” Lance took a deep breath, and everyone seemed to squeeze Keith’s uninjured shoulder on the way up into the cockpit. Shiro supported Keith on his arm until Hunk picked Keith up entirely.

Hunk was nice. He didn’t jostle Keith’s arm. Keith let his eyes slip shut, and he felt the lights of the hall and cockpit move over his eyelids.


	15. Vivisection - Shiro

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: graphic vivisection. a lot of gore. also canon compliant lol

This was his reward.

He had made it through his entire adolescence of physical therapy and medications. He had made it through the most rigorous training Earth had to offer and excelled. He had made it into space, off of Earth, out of the solar system, and through the past five weeks of imprisonment, beatings, and surviving the arena. Surviving meant winning, and winning meant killing, and he had made it through.

The straps were tight on his arms, and he hated himself for being too afraid to kick at his captors when they fastened his legs to the table. It would get him nowhere, and at this point, pissing them off would only make it worse.

He was winning so far. They called him Champion. They liked him, right? They must have liked him enough to let him live, at least.

“What are you doing?” he demanded as fearlessly as he could. It didn’t impress the galra tasked with strapping him down. They had already stripped away his shirt and dignity, and he couldn’t be any less threatening.

“We found something strange in your last test,” the galra to his right replied. It was unusual for any of them to actually answer his questions. They must have been trying to make him nervous this time. “The other two didn’t have anything like it. They appear to be healthy. And on first glance, you’re _very_ healthy.” The galra stopped to look at him, and the raised eyebrow almost made him look playful. “But that’s not right, is it?”

This was his reward for surviving. This was his reward for winning. But nobody wanted a sick champion.

“I don't understand,” Shiro lied. His voice shook convincingly and made the galra snort.

“So, it's news to you that your body is disintegrating? Your muscles are wasting away, slowly but surely. We've already picked up some abnormal heart activity, and you gave us a scare when you couldn't let go of your sword the other day. Your hand wasn't relaxing its muscles, was it? Seems like a pretty specific disorder.”

They knew. It had taken the doctors on Earth years to diagnose him, and the Galra had figured it out in a month.

“You'll lose your ability to walk first,” the galra informed him. “You probably only have a couple more decaphoebs on your feet.”

“What the fuck is a decaphoeb?” Shiro hated that his voice broke on such an absurd question. He was shaking where he was pinned to the table. His eyes stung. They would have no use for him now.

The galra laughed.

“I like you. I'm glad we're keeping you.”

The door at the end of the table opened. Shiro could barely lift his head to see who was entering. He had to wait until they had filed in before he saw the masks. Druids. The Galra called them druids. Following them were several more galra in surgical masks, already pulling on gloves and carrying a sharp sterile scent with them.

He didn't like the idea of being kept anymore.

“What are you doing?” Fear twisted into terror. The surgeons began wiping down his wrists and inner elbows with something cold enough to sting. They had done that before on his first physical examination. At least they seemed to want to prevent infection. They wouldn’t do that if they were just going to throw him away.

They didn't answer him, but they connected a few plastic cords to a couple of large tanks hanging from the ceiling on either side of the light fixture. There was a sucking sound that made his skin prickle, and the cords filled with something dark and violet. At the very ends of the cords, the surgeons connected and uncapped needles.

“No, no. No, what is that?”

“Medical quintessence. Think of it like a blood transfusion,” the first galra supplied. “It'll keep you alive through the procedure. You're gonna do a lot of bleeding.”

“Why?” Shiro knew that he was starting to hyperventilate. He couldn't stop. He wanted to pass out. He hardly even registered the tiny pinches where the surgeons fit the needles into his wrists and arms. Someone put a breathing mask over his nose and mouth, and as his oxygen levels were forced into regulation, he shut his eyes and whined. He must have looked pathetic. He probably looked as sick as he really was, and he wanted to rail against it.

The cold on his chest made him open his eyes again.

They were cleaning his chest. Throat to below his navel.

Behind them, another surgeon had a saw.

He didn't know why he looked to the first galra, the mouthy one, for safety. He said he liked him. He was willing to talk to him. Desperately, Shiro needed him to protect him. He needed a friend.

“Please.” The mask muffled him, so he cried louder. “Please. Please, don't.”

His friend smiled down at Shiro and ruffled his hair.

“We're helping you,” his friend said. The other galra wiped the cold substance off his skin. The surgeon with the saw was stepping forward.

“Put me under,” Shiro sobbed. “Please, just put me under.”

“The quintessence would keep you awake anyway,” the saw-holder said. “Feris, quit talking to him. He'll never shut up.”

“He never shuts up anyway, Doc.”

Doc snorted behind his mask, but he kept his eyes on his work. He lined up the saw with Shiro's sternum.

Shiro couldn't shut up. It was all _please_ and _no_ and _fuck_.

The blade fell through his skin like butter, and Shiro screamed before he even felt it.

And then he felt it. The saw hit bone. It clicked and buzzed and split.

There was fascia to cut through. Connective tissue, all with frightened nerves that never expected to see open air. His veins burned. He would have fainted, the fever in the top of his head told him, but the poison replacing his blood was keeping him awake. After the saw was withdrawn, they sliced him open from his sternum all the way to his navel.

They debated over his rib cage like he wasn't bleeding out and crying himself raw between them. One of them picked up something that looked like an oversized clamp, and Doc gripped him by the new seam of his ribcage.

They peeled him open. He felt the core of his body crack. He stopped crying when his lungs lost pressure.

A monitor somewhere behind him started screaming. He barely heard it over his own choking and gasping. Feris held the mask tighter over his face, and another surgeon barked at the druids, but his chest was open and empty and he had never felt like his entire body was just one hollow socket.

Pressure returned slowly. He wheezed and fought not to cough. Coughing would hurt so badly. It happened anyway out of reflex, and he tried to cry when it strained his open ribs. He looked down.

His body was a cracked egg. It leaked red instead of yellow. The inside of his thoracic cavity was encased in violet. His rib cage was held open in an arch by the clamp, and he could see inside.

His lungs were wrapped in that odd violet glow. The druids were keeping them functional.

He stared. He couldn't stop staring. One of the surgeons reached in with gloved hands and traced the shape of his left lung.

“Two lobes here. Three on the right side. No auxiliary breathing system.”

They caressed and lifted his lungs at the sides to examine them. That part didn't hurt anymore. It was just pressure. His body wasn't meant to feel pain there. He stared at the unlocked box that held his organs.

“ _This_ is beating faster,” one of them chuckled. Fingertips ran over the muscle. It hiccuped and tripped over a beat. Shiro's head felt light. “Can you tell me what this is, Shiro?”

His ribs hurt. The pressure was all wrong. Maybe adrenaline was keeping the pain from overwhelming him, but his awareness was fading.

“Tell me, Shiro,” the voice growled. The hand wrapped around the muscle and threatened to squeeze.

“Heart,” Shiro whispered behind the mask. He whimpered over another half-sob. “That's my heart.”

“And what a beautiful heart it is,” someone said dryly. The surgeons shared a small laugh, and the druids’ magic cloaked his heart, too.

Numb.

He felt numb, but his heart was beating regularly. Strong and steady. His lungs pulled in all the air he needed. He only realized that the surgeons had injected something into the tissue of his heart when they withdrew the needle.

They moved on. They asked him about his stomach. They pressed on his diaphragm and made him cry out. They were absolutely fascinated by his liver, and they took a small piece of it away in a jar. They injected his liver, then his pancreas, then his adrenal glands. They lifted ropes of intestine out of his abdomen and laughed.

“You could hang yourself with it,” they mused.

At some point he started bleeding purple. They commented on that with delight. The violet glow of magic followed the activities, and they reached all the way to his spine to explore everything.

And then they tucked everything away.

They folded his intestines back into place.

They stopped fucking around with his spleen.

They took the clamp off and closed his ribs. They fused his sternum back together with something that glowed and burned, and they used the same device to stitch his muscles and skin. They pulled the needles from his arm and took off the mask. His friend pet his hair.

“Good job, Champion. That was very informative for us, and a very thorough treatment for you. The druids repaired that long term damage for you, and the injections will fix that little genetic issue. Your muscles will repair themselves  over the next few weeks. All better.”

It was like nothing ever happened. They put him back in his cell, and he curled up against the wall and searched under his clothes for a scar. His breathing was as shaky as his hands, and he couldn't find anything. Not a mark. Not a bloodstain. Just a deep ache under his skin.

That little genetic issue. The Galra had taken it away, and Shiro couldn’t process that enough to miss it. He couldn’t miss something that had been killing him his whole life, but it wasn’t theirs to take away from him. He wasn’t worth any less or more than before. He was just going to last longer in the ring.

He held his own hands and stared at them in the thin light of his cell. He wove his fingers together and took them apart again, like a rib cage. He clenched his fingers as tight as he could, and he uncurled them with no resistance. He did this until his nails cut into his palm and bled violet.


	16. You can scream all you want - Shiro/Lance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: torture; mind control; blood; like, a weird interest in blood; not sure how to tag it but it's emotionally fucked up. Evil affection??? No noncon or nsfw, but feels bad. Proceed with caution

He only had the one arm to chain to the wall, and that was the least of the night's injustices.

The druids were supposed to be _gone_ , but the paladins (and Shiro) found them making themselves useful aboard certain military cruisers. It was bitterly unjust that Shiro was back in their captivity. Back in a Galra prison with monsters to host him.

Worse yet was that Lance was with him.

Worst of all were the last words the druids had tossed him as they had dragged Lance, kicking and screaming, out of the room:

“We won't do anything to him that we didn't do to you.”

Shiro had screamed himself raw long after the doors had shut. He had thrown his weight against the chain until his wrist threatened to snap, and as desperate as he was to get free, he knew how useless he would be with his remaining hand broken. He wouldn't be able to get Lance out like that. He wouldn't be able to contact the others for help. At some point, he had been forced to fall quiet and stare around the dark, hollow room, stare at himself and search for a way out.

It had been hours since then.

His hand was bloody just below his wrist, and he was still trying to slide it out of the metal cuff when the door opened again. He sat up straight and looked back in time to see someone dump Lance onto the floor.

Lance groaned and curled his knees up to his chest, and the galra tossed something on to the floor beside him. Shiro heard it clatter and saw the glint of hallway light against the blade. After dropping off Lance and the knife, the galra quit the room without any explanation. The door shut and left them in the half-light.

“Lance?” Shiro's throat hurt to use. He scanned him the best he could in the poor lighting; Lance had all of his limbs. “Baby, talk to me.”

Lance sat up slowly. He pushed himself up on his palms, and Shiro listened to his erratic breathing. When Lance raised his head and found Shiro, he smiled.

“You're okay,” Lance whispered.

“I'm okay,” Shiro answered weakly. And Lance was okay. Lance was in one piece. The relief put a lump in his throat. “We're gonna get out of here, honey. Can you move?”

“I can move just fine.” Lance's smile widened. He picked up the knife, and he crawled on his hands and knees toward Shiro until they were seated in front of each other.

Shiro offered Lance his hand. His arm shook, exhausted after struggling and bleeding for hours, and the chain between his wrist and the wall rattled.

Lance stared at Shiro's hand for a strange moment.

He lifted the knife in his fingertips and dropped the point onto Shiro's open palm.

It didn't _pierce_ him, but Shiro didn't exactly enjoy the slice it gave him. He jerked his hand backward and yelped, and the knife tumbled to the floor with another metallic stammer.

“Lance, hey,” he started and ended, because what was he even supposed to ask?

“Oh, I'm sorry.”

Lance was still smiling.

Shiro stopped breathing, like a deer freezing in the woods.

Lance picked up the knife again, his hold on it delicate and curious.

“Did that hurt?” Lance asked sweetly.

“Yes.” Shiro's voice felt too small to fill his throat. He shrank back from him. “It did. Lance, what's wrong?”

“Nothing's wrong.” Lance crawled closer until Shiro's back was flat against the wall. Shiro wasn’t accustomed to flinching away from Lance--it had never, ever been necessary before. Lance wasn’t used to it either, and the face he made was disappointed.

“Shiro. Baby. Look at me.” Lance slipped even closer and straddled Shiro’s lap, and the fearful noise in Shiro’s throat did nothing to move him.

“Lance, I’m bleeding,” Shiro told him weakly. He showed Lance his hand again and felt ridiculous. He almost always ended up bleeding on a mission, and a little cut on his palm was nothing. Lance stared at him with hard blue eyes, and he cradled Shiro’s hand above his own to check the injury.

He raised it to his mouth and openly kissed his palm. A jolt of wrongness shot through Shiro’s spine when Lance licked up the blood, but he had no room to pull farther away.

“Lance, what the _fuck_?”

Lance gripped him by the wrist. Sometimes Shiro forgot how strong he was.

“I like it,” Lance whispered, and he kissed each one of Shiro’s fingers while Shiro’s heart started to pound in his ears.

“Lance, they did something to you. Baby, listen to me. You can fight it. It’s hard, god, I know it’s hard, but you can fight it.”

“You fought it?” Lance pulled back an inch to stare into Shiro’s eyes. His nails bit into Shiro’s palm and made him cry out. “Did you really fight it? Were you fighting it when you fought _me_?”

This wasn’t Lance. This wasn’t his hug-needy, singing in the shower, sunshine in a dark life, sleepy kisses Lance.

“I did,” Shiro whimpered. “I tried, baby. I’m sorry. And you were there for me. Can I be here for you?”

“You _are_ here for me.” That not-Lance smile came back. “What’s your plan, Shiro? Help me fight it.”

Shiro followed his instincts. He curled his hand and didn’t fight Lance where he held it. He leaned forward, heard Lance’s breath catch, and kissed him.

Lance cooed in his throat. His shoulders relaxed. He dropped Shiro’s wrist and curled one arm around his neck. He kissed him just as sweetly as he always did. It would have been perfect if his mouth didn’t taste like blood.

“I love your kisses,” Lance whispered, and he made that pleasant little noise Shiro loved when he sucked Lance’s bottom lip. He wasn’t expecting any miracle, no Prince Charming released from a spell, but maybe if he could get through to Lance just a little, give him a foothold…

He heard the knife scrape the floor.

Lance picked it up, and Shiro held still with their lips pressed together when the blade touched him under the chin.

“I love _you_ ,” Lance murmured, sincere and tender.

The knife flicked inward.

Shiro yelped and recoiled, and then he felt only a thin, stinging line of pain under his jaw. Lance held the knife back and spun it in hand, and he burst into giggles.

“Oh, handsome, I’d never hurt you,” Lance laughed. He was still humming with laughter when he leaned in and kissed the new cut on Shiro’s neck. Shiro could only sit there and tremble.

“Lance, put the knife down,” he found the breath to whisper. Lance hummed again in question, like he hadn’t heard him or didn’t understand. “Baby, please put the knife down.”

Lance grinned.

“Okay.”

The knife plunged into the meat of Shiro’s thigh.

All bets were off. Shiro screamed, and he didn’t have a choice but to shove Lance back and push him off his lap. His muscle tissue was broken, and lost blood was flooding past it. Was that an artery? Had Lance nicked an artery? Shiro couldn’t tell.

Lance snarled somewhere in front of him. He reached forward and tore the knife from Shiro’s thigh, and that welcomed a gush of dark blood from his leg. Dark red, not bright. Gushing, not spraying. A vein. Fucking wonderful.

“Lance, please.”

Shiro realized he was crying. He never cried. He always expected danger, but never from Lance. By this point in his life, he had been prepared for anything else.

“Shut up.” Lance gripped him hard by the jaw. It pulled at the cut and made it sting worse. “Shiro, shut up. I told you I’d never hurt you.”

“But you _are_.” Shiro choked on his breath and struggled against him. He tried to fold one leg over the other or reach his chained hand down, but he couldn’t cover the wound on his thigh. He couldn’t keep pressure. Lance wasn’t letting him. “Lance, you’re hurting me.”

“Am I?” Lance scoffed. The knife snapped forward again. Lance was getting bolder, and the little cuts were getting deeper. One caught Shiro across the left shoulder. Another sliced down across his collar bone. In only his black flight suit and no armor, Lance could cut him anywhere he wanted. “Are you _hurt_?”

“Yes!” Shiro sounded hysterical to himself. He screamed and tried to thrash away. He gripped the chain with his bloodied hand and tried to pull himself up, pull himself anywhere else but in front of Lance. “Lance, it hurts, I’m scared, baby, please stop.”

Lance’s face wasn’t built for that kind of scowl, eyes sharp, teeth bared. He pulled back, grabbed Shiro by the ankles, and pulled him away from the wall. Shiro’s back hit the floor, and his wrist tugged at the short allowance the chain gave him.

“Shiro,” Lance sang, low and soft and poisonous. He crawled onto Shiro and sat on his hips to hold him down. “I love you so much I could just _kill_ you.”

Shiro couldn’t struggle. He couldn’t get free. Even if he could, he couldn’t hurt Lance.

“Lance, please.” His weeping and hiccuping sounded awful to his own ears, but Lance was transfixed by it.

“I’ve never seen you cry before,” Lance breathed. He bent down, and Shiro only cried harder at the gentle kiss to his cheek. “You’re beautiful. It’s okay, sweetheart. It’s just us.”

The knife found Shiro’s shoulder. It pressed in slowly. Shiro had to savor each millimeter of tissue splitting around the blade, and it just kept coming. His throat was already hoarse, but he shrieked tried to thrash away as animal terror took over. Lance pet his hair and smiled above him.

“That’s it. Scream for me, baby.”


	17. Knife to the throat - Pidge

The paladins didn’t weigh lives against others, but staring into the grey faces on the screen of her captors’ bridge, Pidge saw the scales. The castle and the coalition had over twelve billion lives to protect on this planet. She was just over one hundred pounds of hostage.

She hadn’t meant to get caught, but she had known the risk. This was still worth it. She had still gotten the codes. She had everything she needed to detonate the Galra command center controlling the entire solar system. It was just one tiny button in her pocket, one switch for the command center’s generator, and all she had to do was input the appropriate codes. With the switch behind her  back. While tied to a chair. While being watched very closely by upwards of twenty people in a cruiser hovering just above the occupied planet.

The knife at her throat was steady, and the galra behind her hadn’t said a word through the whole process. It was simple. If she struggled, she would be murdered in front of her teammates and brother on the other end of the call.

“Pidge, it’s gonna be okay,” Matt told her from the safety of the castle’s bridge.

Matt had been fighting this battle for days, and it showed. His hair was filthy with blood and his arm was roughly bandaged, but he was still holding a gun. The other paladins didn’t look much better. They were all propped up at their best, refusing to show weakness to the enemy over this call, but they couldn’t convince her. She had heard each of them take injuries over the comms only an hour ago.

“I know,” she replied. The knife twitched against her skin and made her breathing stiffen, but she held still and let the knife-holder know that she wasn’t making a fuss. All she was doing was tweaking the setting on the side of the remote. No one had noticed yet.

“What do you want for her?” Matt demanded of the Galra commander. He was barely fifteen feet away from Pidge, and he looked genuinely surprised that it had been that easy to get his demands heard.

“The rebels are to surrender this battle,” the commander said, “and you are to surrender the lions.”

If Pidge had a nickel for every time.

“Done.”

Matt didn’t hesitate. That answer drew gasps and disagreement from some of the other coalition captains on the castle bridge, but they were silenced with a sharp wave of Allura’s hand and a shout from Matt:

“That’s my baby sister!”

Matt was serious. Pidge knew better than to think he wouldn’t throw away the whole war if it kept her safe, but Allura? The other paladins? Surely they were a little less biased. If they were going along with this, it was because they had another way to get everyone home safe. This was just to buy time.

She couldn’t tell. Looking at their faces, they may have been ready to surrender.

“Matt,” she said. She didn’t like having the power to make everyone fall silent and look at her, but she would have to deal with that. She felt the last tiny click of the remote under her thumb. It was ready.

“Take care of Green for me.”

She had never seen complete terror on his face before. She braced herself and flipped the switch.

It was visible through the windows of both ships. Outside of the cruiser, Pidge watched the landscape below turn white. She watched it turn yellow and red and then black with smoke, and she saw the faces of everyone in the castle who saw it too. The sound caught up to them and rattled the cruiser.

The occupation was over. The Galra had already lost control of the planet, and without that base, they would never recover it.

The galra behind her tightened his hand on the back of her chair.

She knew it was coming.

Her bayard sliced through her bonds, and it cut through her captor’s knee just as the knife slipped through her throat.

Not deep enough. Deep enough to be bad, but she was alive. She dropped down in the chair to slip out from the Galra’s hold, and then she was sprinting away from the gunfire behind her.

“Matt, take care of Green!” she screamed again. She gripped her bayard with one hand and the gash on her throat with the other, and she shot down the hall beyond the bridge. All she had to do was find an airlock. Green would be there for her any minute.


	18. Clawing at own throat - Hunk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: rope around neck

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when the Galra did something cruel, but of all things, Hunk hadn’t expected them to just leave him like this. It wasn’t an outpost--Voltron had seen to the Galra outpost on this side of the planet already--but a cave, and up until then, they hadn’t realized that something else was already living in it.

Hunk was supposed to be bait for his teammates. Not for whatever was scratching at the walls down the tunnels.

For the “victory or death” types, the squad of perhaps twenty fully-armed Galra made a fast exit once they heard the beast shrieking. And they left Hunk standing there with a rope around his neck, a leash to the cave ceiling.

There was nothing else to do. He watched the last soldier round the corner and disappear down the tunnels, taking the light with them, and Hunk was left alone in the dark.

He grasped at the rope and scraped his nails against it.

If he could get to his helmet, he could navigate out of there without light. Was his helmet on the floor close by? It didn’t matter if he didn’t get out of the noose. It wasn’t even a proper noose; he might have been able to untie that.

Once he found the seam of the knot, pressed against the back of his skull, he grunted and turned on his toes while he worked the rope around in a half-circle. Once he had brought the knot in front of him, it had to be easier to work with, right? At least he could reach it better.

It only got more confusing. What the fuck kind of rope was this? It would have helped if Hunk could see what he was working with, but apparently that was too much to ask.

The beast screamed again. He knew it was getting closer.

He felt at the knot and tried to find the end of the rope. Even when he did, he couldn’t find the next spot that it looped through. There was nothing to tug at. There was no room at the base of it, either, no clearance that would allow him to push the rope up over his head. It was stuck under his jaw.

Maybe if he was quiet, the monster wouldn’t find him. It seemed impossible. Hunk felt like his heartbeat echoed on the walls.

He tore at the rope, and it tore the quick of his nails. He felt  _ some  _ give, not much, but maybe it would be enough. He pulled at the rope and only succeeded in squeezing the blood in his head.

There were claws scratching on the rocks just outside his section of tunnel. There was a flicker of light against the walls. Did the cave beast have a light?

Hunk tried not to wheeze against the rope. He clawed at it and scratched his own neck.

Light flooded the cave. It was here.

“Hunk!”

Pidge and Keith poured into the room and nearly tripped on each other in their rush to get to him. Their armor and visors illuminated the area around them where Hunk’s had been deactivated, and Hunk let relief tighten his throat when Keith pulled out his knife to cut him free.

“Guys! Guys, there’s something that lives in here. There’s a monster coming.”

“Oh, that’s just Lance,” Keith replied. He hooked his blade carefully under the rope. It was cold against Hunk’s skin. A quick tug of the knife had the rope falling away, and Hunk rubbed at his neck.

“What?” he asked breathlessly, and then he saw Lance come in, scraping his rifle against the cave walls and emitting some horrible sound from the back of his throat.

“He’s having fun. Just let him,” Pidge snorted. “I told him about a species that used to live in these systems. The Galra have a pretty bad history with them.”

“Hey, I told you it would work.” Lance grinned and picked up Hunk’s helmet from the floor, and he clasped Hunk’s arm when he passed the helmet to him with the other. “Good to see you, man.”

Before Hunk even put his helmet back on, a deep, rumbling crash echoed from somewhere far down the tunnels. The four of them froze, and a hellish, three-toned roar made Hunk’s stomach flip over.

“Oh, dang,” Lance whispered.

The paladins chased each other out the other tunnel.


	19. Pleading - Shiro/Keith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warning: blood; injury; panic attack; torture references

If Keith struggled much more, he was going to worsen his injuries. While Lance ran to the pilot’s seat to get them out from under the cruiser, Allura tended to Keith. She had to wrap him in an emergency blanket and hold him to make him stop thrashing around.

“Shiro,” Keith gasped. He was trembling so badly in Allura’s arms that she didn’t know how his bones were staying in place. His voice alone was so tattered that he hardly sounded like himself and more like the last huffs of a dying engine. It had taken the team days to get to the cruiser to rescue Keith and Shiro, and she didn’t know how much Keith had screamed during that time. “Shiro, he’s-- Where is Shiro?”

He turned his head around to look through the cockpit. The three of them were the only ones in Red, and that fact tore a high, miserable whine straight from Keith’s chest.

“Keith, it’s alright,” Allura hushed him. She cupped his cheek and pulled him close, and she tucked his head and his blood-matted hair under her chin. “Shiro is fine.”

“No, you don’t understand. We have to--” He resisted her and wrestled himself out of her arms. When his wild eyes landed on her again, he froze. “Allura?”

“Yes, it’s me.” She reached for his hand. Maybe he would listen if she was gentler. “Keith, you’re hurt. You have to lie still.”

“We need Shiro.” He pulled his hand from hers and crawled to the pilot’s seat, dragging his broken leg behind him. Allura had already set and wrapped it against splints. Keith didn’t seem to notice it. Allura hurried towards him to scoop him into the blanket again, but Keith was busy clawing at the armrest of Lance’s seat. “Red, we have to go back.”

“Keith, it’s alright,” Lance insisted. He kept his attention on the flight path ahead of them, but he spared Keith a pained glance. “Hunk carried Shiro out. He’s in Yellow with him and Pidge.”

“Keith.” Allura tried getting his attention and failed. “Shiro’s injuries were substantial. The two of you were separated in the cruiser, and we had to get him to a healing pod as quickly as possible. Hunk has a pod in Yellow for Shiro.”

“He’s hurt.” That seemed to be the only point of information that Keith could latch onto. He stared into the middle space beyond Red’s console for a full second, and then an ugly sob burst out of him.

“Please,” Keith whimpered. “They’ll kill him this time. They’re going to kill him.”

“No, Keith,” Allura murmured. Keith wasn’t cooperating or leaning into her, but she managed to pull him back into her arms without straining his leg. “Shiro is fine. He’s safe.”

“He kept me safe.” Keith’s voice broke. Watching him weep openly was horrible, and Allura could only try to wipe the tears and blood off of his face. “He stopped them from-- It should have been me. It should have been me, we need to get him, _please_.”

“You’ll see Shiro back in the Atlas, buddy,” Lance said. “Just hang on. It’ll be okay.”

“No! Why are you lying to me?” Keith cried, and he reached up to try and take Red’s control from Lance’s hand. Allura had to pin his arms to his chest and cradle him. It was like wrestling a traumatized, bloodied, two hundred pound toddler, especially when Keith started trying to scream. “Why are you leaving him? Please, go back, go back, _go back_ , _GO BACK!_ ”

Lance ducked Red into the cover of the icy moon the team was set to meet at, and as he followed its surface in the Atlas' direction, he stabbed at the comm on his dashboard to open a video feed to Yellow.

“Hunk, Pidge, Keith is delirious,” he reported, voice hard. Keith was still chanting and crying, and Allura was having poor luck in holding him. “Can you get me a visual on Shiro? He won’t calm down without him.”

Hunk answered with a loud, “Um,” and Pidge was busy in the background screaming, “Sit down!”

“Keith?” Even rasping and abused, that was Shiro’s voice. Keith perked up instantly, and this time, Allura helped him sit up to get a view of the screen.

“Shiro?” Keith handled that name so gently that it felt wrong to overhear it.

At the other end of the call, Shiro was leaning heavily against the side of Hunk’s seat. There seemed to be nothing Hunk could do about the matter. Shiro had his arm curled around a large wound across his side and chest, the most immediate of many injuries, but he was there, gazing at Keith. The fear relaxed out of his shoulders.

“He _broke out_ of the _healing pod_ ,” Pidge berated Shiro for all to hear. “I didn’t know you could _do_ that.”

Keith pulled himself up on shaky arms. He tried to crawl into the chair beside Lance just for a better view of the screen, much to Lance’s alarm.

“Keith, are you okay?” Shiro asked.

Allura watched Keith swallow, blink away more tears, and smile.

“I’m fine,” Keith replied. “You’re hurt. You should get back in the pod.”

“Yes, Shiro,” Hunk said, words clipped. “You should get back in the pod.”

“I know,” Shiro sighed, but he didn’t move away. “Keith, will you talk to me? I have a feeling they’re gonna keep me in the pod for a couple of days. I can wear a comm in it.”

“Yeah,” Keith agreed eagerly. “Yeah, I can do that.”

Thank heavens, something to keep Keith busy. Allura realized that Shiro must have known that. Shiro gave Keith that smile, the sweet one that they thought nobody else recognized as Keith’s favorite.

“I’ll see you at home, Keith,” Shiro promised.

“You too.” Keith finally relaxed, and then it was safe to end the call.


	20. Fake kill scare - Hunk

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: broken bones; torture; psychological torture

Even if he could have broken out of the handcuffs and gotten past the dozen sentries and soldiers in the room, Hunk couldn't have run away on his broken leg. He was left on the floor, over one folded knee with his other leg sprawled out beside him, shin throbbing. A soldier was knelt beside him to grip his hair and make him watch the screen.

Lance was in another room. Hunk didn't know how many of the others they had captured, but it was at least the two of them, and the Galra were happy to let them see each other as they beat Lance. The cloth gag in Lance's mouth was colored red with blood. Hunk heard his ribs crack under a sharp kick. Lance struggled and shouted through the gag anyway. He managed a good kick into one of the guards’ legs before another galra grabbed him by the back of his chestplate and hauled him up on his knees, in full view of the screen.

“Where is the princess?” the soldier beside Hunk asked too calmly.

“I don't know.” Hunk had given up on trying not to cry hours ago, and the words were wet and hiccuping. “I don't know. We lost contact with the castle, I swear. I don't know where she's heading.”

“You should stop lying,” the galra told him. He looked to the video feed, and Hunk's eyes found their way back to it as well.

Lance was breathing hard through his nose. He scowled up at a soldier beside him, and though the soldier was out of the frame, Hunk could see the handgun pointed at Lance's head.

“Olkarion!” Hunk screamed. He had no fucking idea. Allura and the castle had vanished, as far as he knew, but any answer was better than none. “She's going back to Olkarion! She--she needed to pick up a weapon from them.”

“You know we have scouts in Olkarion's system, right?” the galra sighed. “You should really stop lying.”

He signaled something with his hand.

The off-screen soldier kicked Lance down, out of sight. Hunk didn't get to see him again. The handgun fired twice, and the feed went quiet.

Hunk's body was screaming, folding onto itself, convulsing with the force of his sobs. His mind was on the floor in front of him.

A nightmare. This couldn't possibly be happening. Hunk wasn't ready to deal with this, so there was no way he was in this situation. He could reset this. He could undo this. His life would collapse without Lance in it.

His head was jerked upward again by the fist in his hair. Hunk could hardly see. He couldn't breathe at all.

He saw Lance's ankle when they dragged him away. Then they dragged Pidge onto the screen, bound and gagged like Lance, wide-eyed and hateful. Her eyes met Hunk's through the video, and both of them froze.

“Wait!” Hunk didn't recognize his own voice. “Hurt me instead. Please. She's the smart one. She can tell you.”

Pidge tried to scream something through her gag. She was trying to tell Hunk something, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered unless she made it out of there alive.

The door shrieked when it was torn open. Hunk's head turned to the side, and all he saw was the blur of one sentry being swung by the ankle, sweeping three more out of the way. The galra beside him moved to take out his weapon, and Hunk ducked when the broken sentry was thrown straight at him. The clatter of metal crashed into the soldier, and Hunk raised his head again to see the fight end.

The sentries were destroyed. The soldiers were sprawled out on the floor or against the wall, varying amounts of blood swelling out on the floor under them. And then Allura, nine feet tall and lilac-skinned, dropped down beside Hunk to untie his wrists.

“Hunk, I'm so sorry we were delayed,” she said in a pleading rush. “The Blades are covering our escape.”

“Lance.” Hunk was still crying. Even when he had the use of his hands again, he didn't know what to do with them. He reached out and clung to Allura's sleeve.

“What about Lance?” she asked, sharp and protective. Hunk only cried harder.

A crunch of metal resounded from the video.

Hunk looked back up with stinging eyes and watched a sentry fall in front of the screen. The second room was cleared. Keith was cutting Pidge loose, and Shiro was running off of the screen towards something in the corner. He sounded broken.

“Lance!”

They had found his body. Hunk let out a despairing moan and leaned into Allura's shoulder.

“Is he alive?” Keith's shout caught in his throat and turned weak. He was still cradling Pidge when he sat up on his knees to see farther into the corner of the room. Hunk shut his eyes.

They would have to bury him. He would have to tell them Lance had died because he couldn't lie well enough to save his friend's life.

“Shiro, that hurts.”

It was such a small voice, and it almost killed Hunk to hear it. He bent over and started to cry all over again.

“I know, Lance, I'm sorry,” Shiro said gently. They were speaking so quietly, but the microphone still picked them up. “C'mon, let's get you home.”

“Oh, Hunk,” Allura murmured, as if she understood all at once. “Lance will be okay. We'll take care of him.”

“They weren’t going to kill any of us,” Pidge growled. She was favoring one shoulder, and she accepted Keith's help to stand up. “I heard them saying they were going to keep all of us as long as it took.”

When Shiro walked back into the video's view, it was with Lance in his arms, careful not to strain his broken ribs. Lance turned his head away from Shiro to spit blood out of his mouth. He looked up at the video feed and smiled, bloody and shaky.

“Hey, Hunk. You okay?”

Hunk shook his head. He had lost Lance for thirty seconds. That would take more healing than his leg.


	21. Dragged by the ankle - Lance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: dead bodies; being hunted; Kuro

The cruiser halls blinked red, darkened, and blinked again, and no sound accompanied the emergency lights. The alarms had shut off twenty minutes ago, and Lance was still lost in the dark hallways while they thrummed red like the inside of a giant, silent heart.

His comms were offline. His hunter had laid down interference of some kind, and Lance couldn't call for help. He couldn't tell the others that he was still on the ship. He couldn't even use his nav systems to help him find an exit. On the plus side, he wasn't encountering any resistance from the crew of the cruiser, aside from the obstacles their dark shapes made on the floor. Some of the Galra had evacuated. Lance stepped over the rest as quietly as he could.

His hunter had cleaned up everyone but him. As far as Lance knew, they were the only two souls left on the cruiser while it hung in empty space.

He just had to get to an exit. From there, maybe he could call Red to pick him up, or he could call the Atlas.

No, not the Atlas. He couldn't risk the other person on the cruiser making it onto another ship. He would have to get to Red.

A scream tore through the halls just a couple of corners down from where Lance was feeling his way along the wall. Then a wet slice tore through the scream. A thud. Then it was silent again, except for Lance's heart pounding in his ears hard enough to make him nauseated. One more Galra soldier down.

“Laaaaancey,” Shiro's voice sang, echoing metallically through the cruiser. It was Shiro's voice, and it was the farthest thing from Shiro. 

Lance covered his mouth with his hand and held his breath. If he tried to run, Kuro would hear him. If he tried to  _ move _ , Kuro would hear him.

The sound of footsteps receded. Lance shuddered silently in relief. He wanted to turn around and go as far as possible from where Kuro might be, but he had to continue forward. Behind him was nothing but dead ends. He made his steps as quietly as he could, and he crept along the dark hall with what scarce light he was given. He took a left, away from the right where he had heard the voice.

He made the turn. He made another. The darkness bore down, and Lance wondered how long the red emergency lights would last before going out completely. He couldn't turn on his suit's lights, either, unless he wanted to make it that much easier to catch him.

Another hallway, and another turn. The passage ahead of him looked longer. There were markedly fewer of the dark shapes of bodies on the floor, and Lance hadn’t been through here before. If there was a way out, it was somewhere past this hall. Each step he made was another step away from Kuro, and Lance only wished he could run.

Something clattered in the halls behind him. Lance took that as his cue, and he moved forward as quickly as he could on the toes of his shoes.

His foot caught under a wire.

His other foot slipped in blood and threw him forward. He yelped and hit the floor hard, and a stack of metal parts crashed down beside him, disturbed by the metal wire he had tripped. The wire, stretched between two jammed doors, was still humming like an out of tune string.

His palms throbbed where they had caught the weight of his fall. He lay frozen and begged the noise to quiet down and contain itself.

He waited for exactly one horrified second. Then he was scrambling to his feet, slipping at first, and then sprinting down the hall and away from Kuro’s trap.

“Lance!” Shiro’s voice shouted behind him, distorted by the maze.

Lance pushed himself to run faster. He slipped again, tumbled, and rolled back to his feet in time to round the far corner of that long hallway. He would have to lose Kuro in this new section of the ship, and he would have to do it fast. Footsteps were pounding behind him, gaining on him. He picked a direction and ran.

He took as many corners as he could. He knew that he was getting himself lost, but even that seemed acceptable as long as it kept him away from Kuro for just a few more minutes. Kuro hadn’t set up traps in this side of the ship. He couldn’t catch Lance here.

He reached the end of a corridor and slowed just enough to shift his momentum to the right. He turned and ran into a dark shape. This one was still standing.

Lance struck a hard chest and stopped. He caught a flash of cold yellow eyes in surreal red light.

Both of them moved. He reached for Lance, but Lance screamed, pushed off of him, and bolted the other way. He didn’t even make it to the next corner before Kuro’s full weight caught him across the back and slammed him into the floor.

His team would have wanted him to be brave, but Lance cut straight to sobbing in terror.

Kuro growled and picked himself up off of Lance. While Lance scrambled forward in a bid to throw himself back to his feet, Kuro wrapped one hard hand around his ankle and tugged him back down. Lance’s teeth cut into his cheek when it met the floor again. 

“Shiro, no,” he started, high and pleading. Kuro found his feet and walked back the way they had come, dragging Lance with him.

“Wrong name, Lancey. You all said I’m not him.”

“Kuro,” Lance sobbed. It was a trick, trying to placate him while also trying to struggle free from him. His nails dragged against the floor and left his fingers raw. “Kuro, let me go, please.”

“No, Lance.” Kuro tugged his ankle sharply, and Lance yelped at the pain it sent through the rest of his body. His weight wasn’t supposed to be hauled like this. Blood was pooling in his head. His rampant heartbeat was making him sick. “We’re gonna send a message to the others, and then you get to wait for them with me.”


	22. Internal bleeding - Keith

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> injury; blood; vomit

Keith had refused to take a partner for this mission. He had told Kolivan that backup would only slow him down, but truthfully, Keith knew that any backup he brought with him would have been unlikely to come home. Better to avoid casualties.

He had known it was too dangerous for two people, so why had he pictured it would be any easier on his own?

It had gone fine, he decided. It was done. He had stolen the data he needed from the facility and only had to take care of a few guards on his way out. He wasn’t bleeding anywhere, either. All he had to do was stay calm, fly his shuttle back to the base, and ignore his dumb stomach ache.

It didn’t hurt that bad. If he curled up his knees to his chest in the pilot’s seat, he could keep his vision from tunneling.

He had dodged most of the attacks sent his way, but he had still caught an elbow right below his ribs. The Galra soldier had slammed him against the wall, right below his chestplate, and Keith’s unprotected middle had taken the full hit. He had been more worried for his spine at the time, but now all he could think about was the soft tissue in front of it.

He wasn’t an idiot--he knew he would have to go to the infirmary the moment he arrived back at headquarters. Just to be safe, he sent a ping to the Blades to let them know he was en route.

His head was already feeling light, but then nausea welled up in it like saltwater. It threw his balance out of the pilot’s seat. He caught himself on the edge of the dashboard, and his stomach heaved.

Bile and blood spilled out of his mouth.

He stared at the mess on the floor. While he sat panting and choking on another wave of nausea, his training ran the numbers on how much time he might have left.

Very little. Certainly not enough to get help.

He reached up to the console again anyway. He repeated the ping three times in quick succession: he was injured. Unlikely to return to headquarters unaided. Requesting support from the closest available team.

The cockpit was calm. It was functioning normally, and the ship was following the path Keith had set for it. Its lights pulsed regularly, and the hum of the engine was smooth. Meanwhile, Keith was bleeding to death on the floor.

A frequency opened above the console.

“Keith?” Kolivan’s voice was as sharp as ever. “Respond.”

“Kolivan,” Keith greeted, but his vowels tasted like rubble. He raised a hand from where he sat beside the chair to show where he was and gave an implied salute. He gagged again, and he spat out more blood while Kolivan growled at him.

“Keith, status, _now_.”

“I have the data,” Keith got out. “Chip. Right pocket. Blew up the facility’s backup.”

“Good. We have your location. Damages?” Kolivan didn’t sound like he was standing still in a control room. Keith listened to heavy footfall and metal clatter on his end of the feed.

“A few guards found me. Neutralized them before they could figure out what I stole. But you know how galra have those extra layers of reinforced protective tissue in their abdomens? Humans don’t have that.”

“Damn it, Keith.” It struck Keith that he had never heard Kolivan angry. Stern, sure, but never really emotional. The sternness never left him, but Keith felt bad for getting so far under his skin. “Lie down and move as little as possible. You know the drill. I found your route, and I’m on an off-base ship not far off from you.”

Keith let out a weak sound and lowered himself onto the floor. His stomach felt tight. His blood was running out of place. He listened to Kolivan climbing into a jet and heard the rumble of it launching.

Kolivan must have been the closest agent, or at least the first able to respond. He would usually send another blade to do this kind of pick-up. He was usually too busy.

_I’m never too busy for you._

Keith let out a sudden laugh that made him sick again, and Kolivan resumed barking at him.

“Keith, keep me updated.”

Keith stared at the puddle of his own blood and spit sliding across the metal floor beside him. He lay with his arm pillowed under his head and tried to regulate his breathing.

“My dad was a fireman,” Keith said. It might have been the first personal thing he had said to him since the trials, but if he was dying, he wanted to think about his dad. “I threw up at school once, and he picked me up and made me soup.” The line was quiet for too long. Keith was starting to shiver, and he groaned and tried to push himself away from the acrid smell in front of him. “Right pocket,” he reminded Kolivan weakly.

“Hand it to me yourself,” Kolivan said. Keith shut his eyes against his nausea and held his arms as tightly as he could stand around his stomach, and he waited through another stretch of silence.

“I don’t know how to make soup,” Kolivan said. Keith choked on his laughter and fought a swell of tears, feeling blood rising in his throat.


	23. Self-surgery - Allura

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> injury; blood

They were all spread thin, and Allura had finished her own piece of the mission a system away, but not without taking a hit to the shoulder. The barb was still implanted there, making her bleed through her armor. The Atlas and the other lions wouldn’t be able to reach her soon enough. Blue’s medkit would have to do.

“We’re on our way, Princess,” Keith promised over the comms. “Were you followed? Are you in a safe location?”

“I’ve landed on Zeredt’s moon,” Allura answered, and she fought her voice not to catch in pain. Blue settled down on one of many, many hills, the only broad-stroke features of the moon’s landscape. “I wasn’t followed. There’s nothing here. I’ll make rendezvous as soon as I can.”

“Are you alright?” That was Lance. He had already been worrying about her, and he would only fuss more once she said the truth. She sighed and said it.

“Not entirely. I’ll need a few doboshes.”

“What happened?” at least four people asked at once. She grimaced at Blue’s ceiling and started to pry off her chestplate one-handed. Moving her right arm at all sent sparks of pain through her shoulder, so she held it as steady as possible.

“One of the pirates hit me with some kind of bolt. It's still in my shoulder. I’m going to remove it and tend to it, and I’ll catch up with you shortly.”

“Allura,” Shiro’s voice insisted, “wait. We can have one of the doctors on the Atlas advise you over the comms.”

“I’m sorry, Shiro--” Allura grit her teeth and, once her armor was aside, worked open the front of her flight suit. “--but Coran is my doctor, and I know he’ll only yell and distract me.”

“Coran is a doctor?” Hunk asked.

“Well, of course,” Allura huffed. Pain was wearing her nerves thin, but she kept her eyes on the medkit’s scissors and cut her flight suit open to the shoulder. Simply using her other hand to steady the material was a strain on her shoulder, so she leaned back against the seat and tried to find more stability.

“So, he’s a bodyguard, an advisor, a mechanic, and a doctor?” Hunk didn’t sound like be believed her.

“Of course. What kind of bodyguard doesn’t have a medical degree?” Allura asked. It made perfect sense to her, but the other paladins were quiet. Had they really not considered that before? She sighed through her nose and finished cutting the suit away from the entry wound.

“Allura, you should really wait until we get to you,” Keith pressed. “If you take it out yourself, you could end up bleeding more.”

“If this thing cuts into me anymore, I'll bleed more.” Allura bit back a whimper and tilted her head to look at the barb in her shoulder.

It was a metal spike the width of her little finger, and the length of it was cut in the shape of an X. She had four slender, serrated blades embedded in her. She groaned and picked up the forceps from the medkit.

It took her a moment to find a good grip on the oddly-shaped spike. She worked to find the exact same angle it had pierced her in, and she gave it a careful tug.

The serrations of each edge bit into her. She choked on a cry, and her team spoke up again.

“Allura, do you have something to stop the bleeding?” Lance asked. She nodded, invisible to the audio feed.

“I have gauze. Disinfectant. Tape. I'll be fine.” She stopped just to breathe for a moment. She wiped sweat from her forehead and managed to get blood in her hair. “I'm not waiting around with this thing stabbing me.”

The team was quiet again, and Allura worked the spike out as carefully as she could. Her slow caution might have just given her more time to let the metal find new angles in her muscle to slice, and she began to mumbled and curse at it. Another pull had the blade slicing a little more through her skin at the surface, and she bit down on her lip to keep from making a sound.

“Are you sure?” Keith checked in yet again.

“I'm sure. Just give me a moment.” She blew out through pursed lips, and she found a new, tighter grip on the barb.

“You can do it,” Lance said, gentle and encouraging.

She held onto that. She grit her teeth, muted her mic with a thought, and pulled. She kept the motion steady and straight, and she kept pulling even when the pain ripped through her and seared her skin. She screamed from her chest.

The spike was longer than she had expected. She dropped it into a bag from the medkit, and she grabbed a handful of gauze to press to her shoulder. When she unmuted herself, she was breathing hard, nauseated with pain.

“I got it out,” she reported, and her team breathed relief and congratulations. 

“Good job,” Shiro sighed. “Patch yourself up and take it easy. We'll be there in a few.”

Allura lay back against the seat and groaned assent. There was sweat dripping from her neck and her hands shook with adrenaline, but she held pressure on the hole in her shoulder.


	24. Bleeding out - Lance/Keith/Shiro

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> warnings: blood; grave injury

Shiro had done everything he could, and Lance was still lying there on the floor of the shuttle, broken and bleeding. He had bruises and cuts on his face, scrapes on his hands, and too many gunshots for one body to stand. One arm was broken, as were at least three ribs. A concussion was likely. Spinal damage was all but guaranteed. It was a miracle that he had even made it this far. With the shuttle on autopilot towards the Atlas and SOS active, Shiro finished patching what injuries he could, sealing them with an emergency tissue bond and then wrapping them with gauze. The worst of the injuries were too broad to cover with the gauze alone. Shiro was dressed in his armor, but he took his uniform jacket and cut it into strips for extra material. He wrapped the deep, jagged gash reaching from Lance’s side to the center of his chest, then the open gunshot through his thigh. He held pressure, but Lance was still bleeding through the layers. He had lost so much blood already.

“Thanks for coming for me,” Lance told him, smiling up at him. There was blood on his teeth, and his voice sounded like an old door hinge.

“Anytime.” Shiro was quiet, and it hurt to return that smile. Lance was shivering, so Shiro took the thick emergency blanket from its compartment and tucked it around him. “Just take it easy. We’ll have you in a pod before you know it.”

Lance shook his head. His smile held like stubborn brickwork, but his eyes broke like rainclouds.

“Shiro, this shuttle can’t go any faster.” Lance’s voice was no better than a whisper. “All our comms are short range, and the Atlas has no idea where we are.”

“They’ll find us,” Shiro swore. “Or we’ll stop at a Coalition outpost.”

“That could take days.”

“Let me worry about that,” Shiro said. “Your job right now is to get some rest. I’ll see what systems I can push on this thing.” He started to stand, but Lance pulled his unbroken arm from the blanket and reached out for him. Shiro couldn’t leave him like that. He clasped Lance’s hand between both of his own, and he sat down again. Lance stared back up at him with a tide rolling over his eyes until it dripped onto his cheek.

“I don’t feel right,” Lance whispered. It was such an obvious understatement that it hurt Shiro’s stomach. “Shiro, I’m really scared.”

Lance thought he was dying.

Shiro regarded his ashen face and the weakness in his hand. He counted his injuries over again. He worked through it, weighing his bias that refused to accept the possibility as it became a reality.

Lance was dying.

“Will you stay with me here? Please?” Lance’s voice was too small to refuse. Shiro nodded. He held Lance’s hand with one of his own, and he reached out and stroked his hair.

This was Lance. Brave, precious, disarmingly sweet Lance, the one who had brought them all together in the first place. The one who had held them together every step of the way after that. The one who had taken the time to save each one of them in turn, and they had never paid him back.

“I’m so sorry, Lance,” Shiro whispered. Everything was quiet. They only spoke carefully. “I should have been there.”

“It’s not your fault.” Lance’s fingers shook, but they squeezed Shiro’s as tightly as they could. His eyes demanded Shiro’s attention. “It’s not your fault.”

Shiro didn’t believe him. It didn’t matter. These moments wouldn’t have any room for absolving Shiro of his guilt. He just smiled back down at him painfully and pet his hair again. Lance seemed to like that.

“I’m right here, Lance. I’m not going anywhere.”

Lance sniffed and nodded.

“Thank you. Can you just… I dunno. Hold me?”

Moving him would only exacerbate his injuries, so Shiro lay down next to him. He settled as closely as he could, enough to tuck Lance’s head under his chin, and put his arm around Lance to cradle him.

Lance’s good arm came up to cling to Shiro’s sleeve, and he let out a tiny sob that sounded like it hurt his ribs. There was cold sweat in his hair, and every other breath came with a weak shiver. Shiro pressed his stinging eyes shut and kissed the top of Lance’s head.

“It’s okay, buddy. I’ve got you. It’s okay.”

“Yeah.” Lance swallowed with so much effort that Shiro could hear it. “I'm… I’m really glad we got to come back to Earth. I’m really happy I got to see my family again. Can you tell them…?”

“I will. And they know.” It wasn’t Shiro’s turn to cry. He fought against it and somehow kept his words steady. “They love you so much, Lance. We all do.”

Lance sniffed again. He was getting quieter, and his breaths were coming slower, fainter against Shiro’s neck.

“I love you guys, too. A lot. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, Lance.” Shiro put a small smile in his voice. “You’re everyone’s favorite, you know that?”

Lance laughed weakly, but it was enough to make him cough.

“Even Keith’s?” Lance joked, quiet.

“Especially Keith’s. He tells me how proud he is of you all the time.”

Lance hummed in place of another laugh. “Does he really?”

“Yeah. He thought you wouldn’t believe him,” Shiro chuckled.

Only nights ago, Keith had confessed as much to Shiro as they walked back to their bedroom. Shiro had said that Lance had really stepped up to the plate as Red Paladin, and Keith had agreed.

‘He really has. We wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without him. He’s pretty amazing.’

‘Lance would love to know you thought that,’ Shiro had said, and Keith had snorted.

‘What am I supposed to do? Tell him?’

Keith was going to hate himself.

“I’m proud of him, too.” Lance sighed. He let the quiet sit for a moment. “I like him. I never told anyone, but I think I love him.”

The words hit Shiro like an irregular pulse.

Lance was in love with Keith. He probably had been for a long time.

Was Lance bringing it up now because he _knew_? Shiro and Keith hadn’t told anyone about them yet, but maybe Lance had seen through them. He couldn’t say anything that didn’t risk rubbing it in Lance’s face.

“Lance, I’m so sorry,” he started.

“It’s alright. He’s always been out of my league, anyway,” Lance chuckled thinly. “He’s out of everyone’s league. I kinda wish I’d told him, though. The look on his face would’ve been great.”

Shiro shook his head. So Lance didn’t know at all. He was already broken enough without the regret and reflections, and Shiro couldn’t let him think like that.

“You should tell him when we get back,” Shiro told him. Lance’s laugh sounded like sand.

“You think I have a chance?” Lance asked, amused by the prospect without hoping for it.

“I’d say you do.” It might have been cruel to say at any other time, but if this was the only happiness Shiro could offer him, it was what he would give. “He likes you more than you know.”

Lance huffed, unconvinced. “It’s Keith. He’s not exactly shy about his feelings.”

“You’d be surprised,” Shiro said, soft and honest.

Keith was shy until he snapped. Keith had waited for Shiro to say something–until Keith had greeted him with firm hands on his armor and an offered kiss, just barely reined back, waiting to be accepted. Keith was quiet about his feelings, and always had been, until the night he had finally come to Shiro’s door and poured his heart out.

Lance hummed. “Now I feel bad. If he likes me, and neither of us said anything…”

“He’ll be happy to hear it from you.”

Lance laughed through an exhale. Shiro could hardly fathom how much pain he was in, and the cockpit smelled like copper, but Lance was still trying to smile and laugh.

“He’s just so cool,” Lance whispered. “And he’s really funny, once you get through to him. And he’s brave and selfless, and… sometimes I wanna hit him on the head, but he’s so sweet.”

Lance had no idea. The corners of Shiro’s eyes stung when tears ran over them, but he stayed quiet.

“Yeah, he is,” Shiro agreed, almost silent.

“He’s actually a lot like you,” Lance added. “Except I don’t wanna hit you on the head.”

Half of a laugh and a sob welled up in Shiro’s throat, and they weakened each other into nothing but a small gasp.

“Glad to hear that, buddy.” One stroke through Lance’s hair after another. One tiny, fragile breath at a time. “He’s a lot like you, too. Clever. Kind. Brave, and good. You’ve always been so good, Lance.”

Shiro felt Lance’s face move against his neck. He felt him tuck himself closer and smile, and he felt cold tears on his skin.

“I’m tired,” Lance whispered. His fingers twitched on Shiro’s arm, trying to maintain some grip. “I’m glad you’re here with me, Shiro.”

He was quiet for too long that time.

Shiro whispered, “Lance?”

Lance lay still.

Shiro turned his face into the floor and cried, clenching the sounds in his chest. He stroked Lance’s hair back from his forehead, and he sat up enough to press a kiss there.

A tone rang out from the console. Shiro pulled himself up in a painful, dazed rush and gripped the side of the pilot’s seat when he stood.

“Shiro? Lance?” Keith’s voice said. “This is the Atlas. We’re coming in for pickup. What’s your status?”

Shiro cut through the greetings. He didn’t know his own voice.

“We need Allura and a healing pod _now_.”

“You heard him,” Keith shouted, seemingly over his shoulder. “Shiro, what happened? Are you–”

“It’s Lance.”

Dismayed voices rippled behind Keith’s.

“Reroute to these coordinates,” Keith answered tightly. “We’ll intercept you. Your docking bay is C-1. We’ll have a pod waiting. Allura, let’s go.”

 

* * *

 

Lance was carried out of the shuttle in the healing pod. Everyone trailed after him on his journey to the medbay, and Shiro listened, bracing himself for a damning, ‘no signs of life,’ or ‘he’s gone.’ He couldn’t hear them clearly enough. He followed and stumbled, and Keith caught him under his shoulder and swore, seeing the gashes across Shiro’s thigh and hip.

“Shiro, you didn’t say you were injured, too,” Keith bit out.

“I forgot,” Shiro said honestly.

“God save me,” Keith growled, and he took almost all of Shiro’s weight upon himself on their way to the medbay.

“I’m sorry.” The words tasted raw in Shiro’s mouth, like the tang of copper.

“Shiro, this wasn’t your fault,” Keith insisted. “You made the right call. You grabbed a shuttle, and you made it onto the cruiser before they got away from us. You’re the reason we didn’t lose Lance after the hyperspeed jump.”

But they _had_ lost him. Shiro shut his eyes tight and shook, and Keith stopped them outside the medbay doors.

“Oh, Shiro.” Keith let him lean against the wall, and he cradled his face in his hands until Shiro met his eyes. Keith’s eyes were clear, beautiful violet like layers of dark glass, and they were so gentle for him.

“My love, we’re going to take care of him,” Keith whispered. He dried Shiro’s cheekbone with a stroke of his thumb. “You saved him.”

“I held him as he died, Keith. I…” Shiro sobbed out loud this time. Keith caught him in his arms and held Shiro’s face to his shoulder. “I talked him through it. He's…”

“He’s alive,” Allura said, sudden and breathless from the inside of the room, and Shiro broke down.

 

* * *

 

Lance was in a spectacular amount of pain. He needed to find whoever had stitched him back together and push them off a cliff for putting him through this. He squinted against the bright lights, ringing in his ears, and ungodly headache that throbbed all the way down his spine, and he groaned and tried to go back to sleep.

“Oh, God, Lance.”

Shiro. Shiro had rescued him. Shiro had taken hits for him and carried him out. Shiro had patched him up as well as he could with what they had, and he had held him while everything went dark.

Lance gasped and tried to sit up, and that sent a massive bolt of pain through his chest. He whined and lay still again.

Both of his hands were being held. Both of them were squeezed gently.

“Shiro?” Lance croaked. He blinked past the lights and let his eyes adjust to see Shiro sitting next to him, smiling tearfully. He had never seen Shiro cry before, and the sight just might have finished him off. He grinned up at him anyway. “Hey. You’re okay.”

“ _You’re_ okay,” Shiro emphasized. “You scared us pretty bad.”

“How? I’m not scary at all,” Lance laughed, but it came out as a wheeze. That led to a cough while his ribcage tried to correct itself. It settled down abruptly when he felt another warm hand cup the back of his neck and help him lift his head. Wide-eyed, he looked at Keith sitting on his other side.

Keith had dropped Lance’s hand to hold his head up, and his other was offering him water.

Lance was dehydrated as hell. He stared up at Keith, vaguely recognized someone’s heart monitor beeping faster, and closed his lips around the straw. He drank and broke eye contact, feeling his face go so warm that it made him dizzy. He opened his mouth again when he was done, and Keith set aside the water and lay him back down on the pillow.

“Hi, Keith,” Lance said weakly.

He had told Shiro. And Shiro was here. And so was Keith. Had Shiro told Keith? It seemed like a silly thing to worry about when Lance had just crawled back from the brink of death, but he had to have his priorities. But if Shiro had told Keith, then Shiro probably would have gone and given them some privacy, right? So he hadn’t told Keith.

“Hi, Lance,” Keith replied with a smile. That was a soft fucking smile and a soft fucking voice, and it was for Lance. He wished he had it on video to keep forever. “My boyfriend told me you had something to tell me.”

Oh.

Oh, there went the rest of his heart. Lance couldn’t blame Shiro, but shit. That stung. He looked anywhere but at their faces, and he choked on an answer.

“Lance,” Keith said again, commanding his attention with barely a breath.

Keith held his long hair back against his cheek with his fingertips when he leaned down, and it was the prettiest thing Lance had ever seen.

Then Keith’s lips touched his.

Lance gasped. He almost forgot to kiss him back, and he wasn’t sure that he was allowed to. It was over so quickly, and then he was looking up into those dark, tender eyes in shock.

“We love you too,” Keith whispered.

This was probably how a firework felt on its way up, right before it exploded.

“Yeah?” he whispered back, incredulous.

“Yeah.” Keith grinned and came in for another kiss.

There was the explosion. Lance made a weak sound in his chest and raised his hand to touch Keith’s face. When they parted, a strand of Keith’s hair tickled Lance’s jaw, and he couldn’t believe how soft Keith’s smart mouth was. He turned his eyes to Shiro, sitting beside them and looking so sweetly amused. His thumb traced Lance’s knuckles and made his poor overworked heart stumble.

“I might have a huge crush on you, too,” Lance added. “For a really long time.” Shiro smirked back down at him.

“Good. We’re kind of a package deal.”

“Oh my God,” Lance laughed, full of firecrackers and butterflies and a heart monitor that was scolding him for being so happy. “I think I died. Is this really happening?”

Shiro just smiled and leaned down to him to take his turn.


	25. Dragged by the ankle, part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I got a couple people asking about a follow-up to Lance's Dragged by the ankle chapter, so I wrote this extra piece! Last one I can do for the bingo! Thank you all so much for requesting and encouraging me through this!
> 
> This turned out very Kuro and Shiro heavy idk what happened
> 
> warnings: blood; physical restraints; Kuro being a fucking creep. There's no noncon but Kuro's still creepy. Has very one-sided Kuro/Lance

Adrenaline made the hallways look more red than black, and as Kuro dragged him through them, Lance stopped scratching at the floor. They were slick with blood, and the feeling of it on his hands was one more repulsive thing he didn’t need. Lance had too many questions, but he only found one way to frame them:

“Kuro, why?”

Kuro heaved a great sigh and pulled Lance along. He let him bump against a corner when they took another right.

“Because they’ll come back for you. And then…”

Lance couldn’t think about  _and then_.

He threw his weight to the side. He braced his leg and rolled, and it threw Kuro’s balance for a good second, at least long enough for Lance to kick out at his wrist. His heel found its target, and Kuro’s grip broke.

Lance spun onto his knees, pushed up to his feet, and broke into a run.

It didn’t last. Lance was fast, but Kuro was faster. When the hallway ended at a fork, Kuro just kept running, grabbed Lance before he could turn, and slammed him against the far wall. Lance screamed and thrashed, throat held between the wall and Kuro’s unforgiving hand.

The wall beside his head gave with a crunch and a metallic screech.

Lance stopped and turned his head to look. Kuro’s right fist was embedded in the wall, glowing hot, turning the metal soft and malleable a little over a foot away from Lance’s skull.

Kuro dragged his fist out of the wall, and the light from it dimmed to nothing. He smiled at Lance in that last flicker of violet, under another thrum of red emergency lighting.

“You’re gonna be good for me, right?” Kuro asked lowly. “I really don’t wanna hurt you, baby.”

Even deactivated, his hand felt unnaturally hot. It dragged against Lance’s skin under his jaw. Lance’s breath hitched in fear, and he squirmed.

“I’ll be good. I’m sorry, Kuro.”

“Good.” Kuro was still smiling. His thumb stroked Lance’s chin.

He turned them again and threw Lance down. Lance caught himself on his knees and hands, and behind him, Kuro’s hand locked into his hair to hold him up.

“Hands behind your back,” Kuro instructed. Lance obeyed, and Kuro knelt down. A cord wound around his forearms and wrists, and Kuro cinched it tight. Then he shoved Lance down entirely, and he fixed another cord around his ankles. “That’s better. C'mere.”

Lance couldn’t follow that order, but Kuro took care of it for him. He scooped Lance up and threw him over his shoulder, one hand on his back and the other around his knees. Lance’s breath left him in a grunt, and he watched the hallways recede as Kuro carried him away.

When they reached Kuro’s destination, he stopped and tapped a panel on the wall. A pair of doors hissed, Kuro walked them into a room, and Lance watched the doors shut again with a heavy click. He raised his head to turn and see as much of the room as he could.

They were on the bridge. It seemed that Kuro had cleared out the bodies, but the blood stains stuck to the walls and floor. The room was wide, the ceilings low, and the broad sweeping window showed them dark, open space. It was a point of constant dark against the continuous pulse of the red lights.

Kuro found a seat at one of the consoles. He slumped into it and dropped Lance off of his shoulder in the same motion, catching him in his arms. Lance yelped when the readjustment jarred him, and he sat frozen in Kuro’s lap while his captor typed at the console with one hand.

A single tone sounded from the panel. The lights stopped shifting, and the red held steady. Lance watched as Kuro worked through another screen, and a symbol that suggested a red barrier vanished, leaving an open white symbol instead.

Kuro put a call through.

The answering screen appeared seconds later, and Allura and Shiro were the first faces Lance saw on the Atlas’ bridge. Lance had never seen that same horror in their eyes as when they found him and froze.

“Lance,” Shiro said first. The battle that had separated them had taken place across a handful of cruisers, and Shiro wore bruises, scrapes, and a split on his bottom lip from it. Blood matted his hair on one side.

“Hi.” Lance attempted to sound brave instead of guilty. He had gotten captured. This complication was his fault.

“Lance, we’ve been looking for you.” Shiro’s voice was tight with fear, but of course he wanted Lance to know that he hadn’t been abandoned. He addressed his double next, eyes hard and cautious. “Kuro, what do you want?”

“Oh!” Kuro brightened up when he was noticed. “Oh, you think this is a hostage situation?”

“Isn’t it?” Allura growled. She was nearly as bloody as Shiro beside her, battle-worn and fierce. Her endless patience was depleted. “We have your location. State your terms.”

“No terms,” Kuro replied. “I rescued him from the Galra for you. I’m just holding onto him for you until you pick him up.”

“Bullshit,” Shiro said flatly.

Kuro stiffened as if insulted. “Maybe I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart. Maybe you got through to me, Shiro.”

Lance had never seen that kind of hateful stare on Shiro’s face before. His attention turned from Kuro and back to his captive.

“Lance, are you okay?” Shiro asked.

Lance’s throat stuck. Kuro nudged him hard in the side.

“Answer him, pretty boy,” Kuro murmured, so Lance cleared his throat.

“Yeah, I’m great,” he said as dryly as he could. “Kuro and I are just, you know, chilling out. And I’m tied up. I don’t know what he’s planning, but he murdered everyone else on this cruiser to get to me.”

“I kept him safe for you,” Kuro reframed, even as Shiro went pale.

“We’re on our way,” Allura said, nodding to the navigator off-screen. “Tell us the catch now. We won’t negotiate when we arrive.”

“Again, no catch.” Lance stole a glance at Kuro’s smiling face, highlighted by the screen. “I just want Lance returned safely. And I guess I wouldn’t mind a ride.”

Allura barked a disbelieving laugh. “You cannot be serious.”

“I’m serious about not dying on this piece of shit,” Kuro said, gesturing with one arm to the bridge around them. “I want back on the Atlas. I’m not under the Empire’s control anymore, so I don’t want any of you trying to put me in a box again. I don’t want any ideas about marooning me again. I want to be on the Atlas.”

“Why on Earth would you want to be on the Atlas?” Shiro wasn’t blinking. The muscles of his jaw stood out. “You made yourself unwelcome last time.”

Kuro laughed thinly. “What are you gonna do? Kill me?”

“Like you won’t try to kill me again?” Shiro snarled, and it made Lance’s stomach wrench and drew an even worse reaction from Kuro.

His whole body tensed. His right hand flared white and violet, and Lance froze with his eyes locked on it. It didn’t come anywhere near him. A baleful growl rose up from Kuro, and his hand crashed through the corner of the desk on his other side, away from Lance. Lance flinched and yelped, listened to the metal shriek, tasted it burning and melting, and then Kuro’s arm went dark again.

“I kept him safe!” Kuro shouted. Lance flinched deeper into himself and turned his face away. He didn’t want to hear Shiro’s voice in that tone. “I’m protecting him!”

“Then why is he tied up?” Shiro demanded.

“Because he’d run away if he wasn’t! None of you trust me!”

“Kuro,” Shiro interrupted, lowering his voice. Lance wondered if Shiro ever took that tone with himself in his mind. They were silent for a long moment, and Kuro seemed to take the reminder to breathe deeply. His arm around Lance relaxed by a small degree.

Finally Kuro spoke again, with a thin stoic shell over his words.

“I’m doing the best I can.”

Lance believed him. That didn’t mean Kuro was doing well.

Kuro was a sociopath. As a person, he was deficient in his sense of empathy or social responsibility. This didn’t excuse the things that he did, nor the crawling along Lance’s skin every time Kuro looked at him.

If the best he could do was to paint this ship red and try to kill Lance’s friends, there was something vital missing.

Maybe they could find a way to help him. Maybe the Alteans knew some form of rehabilitation for people like him. Maybe he could learn to be half as good as Shiro was.

Shiro didn’t appear to have any such sympathy for his clone.

“Untie Lance,” Shiro said, grave and clear. “If I find another scratch on him, you will die on that ship.”

Lance gasped when Kuro moved him on his lap, and he sat still while Kuro pulled the cord around his wrists to untie it.

“Sure thing, Captain,” Kuro said. “He’s already got a few scratches on him, but I won’t add any more. He’ll tell you. Won’t you, Lancey?”

“Ankles, too,” Shiro growled. Lance’s legs weren’t even in view, and Lance had to wonder how he just  _knew_. Kuro sighed and followed orders, but even when Lance was untied, he kept his arms around his waist and his figure held firmly in his lap.

“You won’t run away from me, will you?” Kuro whispered, and Lance didn’t know how to answer. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he shook his head.

“Kuro.” Shiro’s voice was iron. “Hands off of him, or I’ll kill you myself.” Kuro hesitated. Lance felt his fingers curl tighter, like he could already feel Lance slipping away. “You said he’s not a hostage, so act like it. If you’re sincere–if you’re good to him–then I’ll allow you to board.”

Kuro stared back at him, lips pressed thin. He didn’t let go of Lance.

“I’ll have my own room,” Kuro stated.

“Of course,” Shiro replied.

“Not a cell.”

Shiro’s eyes narrowed. “Your own room, with as much security as I see fit.”

“I want to help on missions,” Kuro continued.

“Out of the question.”

“I make an excellent shock trooper,” Kuro pressed.

“And here I thought you didn’t have any terms,” Shiro said dryly. “We have a read on your vessel. It’s going to lose life support in vargas. The Atlas is your only option, and you need the crew to feed you, tend to you, and pilot you to safety. And it sounds like you need the Coalition’s protection, now that you’re a fugitive of the Empire. Maybe you busted out of your cell on one cruiser that was already dead in the water, but my bet is that even if you had an escape pod left for you, you would have nowhere else to go in it. You don’t get to make terms. You get to beg.”

Lance hadn’t thought it was possible for anyone to cut Kuro down, let alone with something so soft as words. In battle he was impervious, but the angry fear in his eyes only spoke of defeat.

“You enjoy seeing me backed in a corner, don’t you?” Kuro seethed.

“Your only chance of survival,” Shiro made very clear, “is if Lance is returned to us unharmed. I’m not buying the change of heart, but I’ll believe that you’re afraid to die.”

Kuro scoffed indelicately. “What makes you think I’m afraid to die?”

“Because I am,” Shiro answered, entirely toneless.

Kuro sat in livid silence. Allura watched Shiro beside her, her face wrought with caution and sadness. Lance found himself unable to breathe.

“Let him go, Kuro. I’m not asking.”

Kuro held still.

Then he unwound his arms from Lance’s waist. Lance wasn’t entirely sure what Shiro was planning–did he want to give Lance this opportunity to fight back, or did he intend for Lance to sit and wait for rescue?–so he moved slowly. He stood up and stepped aside, and he planted himself beside the chair just to be out of Kuro’s lap. To his surprise, Kuro stood up and went to the other side of the chair, and he patted the back of it to offer Lance his seat. Lance gawked at him, but he followed the suggestion and put himself back down in it.

”See? I can be good,” Kuro insisted with one hand on the back of the chair. “You believe in the good in everyone. Aren’t you going to believe in yourself?”

Shiro stared back at him balefully. Lance hadn’t thought that Takashi Shirogane had that kind of hatred set aside for anyone.

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Not a fucking scratch.”

“You got it.” Kuro raised his hand and gave a crisp salute.

“Lance,” Shiro said, and Lance straightened up hopefully. Shiro’s earnest eyes were themselves again. “We’re coming for you.”

Lance swallowed the knot in his throat and smiled.

“I know,” he said softly. “I’ll hang tight.”

The call closed. Lance could only imagine Shiro giving orders to subdue Kuro as safely for everyone else as possible.

Kuro was tapping his fingers on the back of the chair. His frustration radiated off of him like heat, and Lance had to hope that Shiro was right. It was a thin hope of bargaining that kept Kuro from disemboweling him like everyone else on the cruiser.

“Stop worrying,” Kuro growled, and Lance wondered at first which of them he was talking to. “I’m not gonna hurt you.” He went on to mumble under his breath, “Dickhead. Piece of shit. I can be good.”

Kuro was playing at ‘good.’ Lance didn’t know if he was truly capable of it.

“It might just be the whole definitely-not-hostage situation,” Lance admitted, “but I’m really glad you’ve decided to be good.”

Kuro gave him a cold, measured look. “I can be better than him.”

Lance didn’t like the surety in his voice. He didn’t like the implications of Kuro wanting to be on Shiro’s ship when they obviously hated each other.

“I won’t let you hurt him,” Lance vowed.

“Why would I do that? I love Shiro.”

Lance stared at him.

“You  _hate_ Shiro,” Lance reminded him cautiously.

“That, too. Makes me wanna just… take his heart out and put it in my chest,” Kuro ended on a thoughtful sigh. Lance’s heart was beating hard, an off-kilter throb that made his throat tighten with nausea. Kuro’s bright yellow eyes, clear and expressive with sharp, too-defined pupils in the surrounding glow, landed on him again and froze him like headlights.

“I know him,” Kuro whispered. “I  _was_ him. He loves you. He loves you all so much, with everything he has. So  _I_ love you. And you, Lance…” Kuro gripped the arms of the chair and leaned down. He didn’t touch Lance. He was following the rules, but he came as close as he could, smiling an inch from Lance’s ear.

“I love you the most.”


End file.
